Fae · specimen №03
Blocktower
A storyteller's toolkit for running Blood on the Clocktower games.
For things the Grimoire can't track, Blocktower give storytellers vote counts and tracking, dead votes, phase management, timers and a game log at the end.
- Role
- Product design, engineering
- Platform
- iOS
- Years
- 2025–present
- Built with
- Swift · SwiftUI · WidgetKit · StoreKit
- Status
- Live
The problem
Running a game of Blood on the Clocktower for a table of fifteen people is a performance. The person running it is tracking votes, remembering who has a dead vote left, watching the clock, and reading the room, all at once. And doing the mental math about how many votes are required is easy to get wrong.
Every existing option felt hacky. Whiteboards, phone notes, and general-purpose tracker apps all had the same failure mode: the moment you're operating the tool, you're not watching the game. Which is the entire job.
The approach
The design target was to make it feel like effortlessly playing an instrument. Every interaction was measured by how easy it is it do without thinking. That meant gesture-first controls over buttons, one-handed reachability over dense layouts, and defaults tuned so the common case needs no configuration at all. The highest compliment the app can receive is that a storyteller forgets they're using it.
Decisions that mattered
4 entries
Gestures over chrome
The core actions (nominating, marking a vote count, killing a player, advancing the day) are gestures. No modals, no confirmations. Mistakes are cheap to undo, which is what makes skipping confirmation safe.
Dead votes are first-class
The rule most often tracked wrong by hand, and the one no competing tool modeled properly. Getting it right in software removes an entire category of mid-game argument.
State survives interruption
Games get paused. Phones lock, apps background, batteries die. Game state is persisted continuously rather than at checkpoints, so nothing is ever lost to the mechanics of the device.
Free, with no account
The app is useful the second it opens. No signup wall between a curious storyteller and the thing they're evaluating during a game that starts in ten minutes.
What it does
In play
- Live vote tracking with automatic dead-vote accounting
- Phase and day/night management
- Configurable timers for nominations and discussion
- Home screen widgets for at-a-glance state
Around the table
- Fast setup: a new game is running in under a minute
- One-handed operation throughout
- Roster import from Slaydate via QR scan
- Game log export back to the event platform
Marginalia
Blocktower is deliberately narrow. It does several very focused jobs for one kind of person, and the roadmap is deliberately short.
More figures
From the app
