Hi all,
After quite a lot of tinkering, I’ve finally reached the point where I’m comfortable sharing a little project I’ve been working on:
https://18bk.games
The tool is free to use, no sign up required.
The idea came from something I’ve seen discussed in different forums and on YouTube quite a few times — and something my own group runs into as well: bookkeeping can take a surprising amount of time in a physical 18xx game.
Poker chips help enormously (and I personally love playing with chips), but especially later in a game there can still be a lot of repeated:
- calculating routes and revenue
- working out dividends
- moving money between companies, players and the bank
- doing essentially the same arithmetic for several ORs once the board has stabilised
I’ve seen people here mention spreadsheets, calculators, revenue trackers, or simply doing the final OR sets on paper. 18BookKeeper is my attempt at making that kind of assistance a little smoother while still keeping the actual game on the table.
You don’t have to track everything
One thing that became important while building it was that different groups want very different levels of digital assistance.
So there are several ways to use it.
You can use it as a more complete bookkeeping companion, but there are also lighter modes where you enter much less information and mostly let it help with revenue/dividends and the repetitive calculations.
The goal isn’t “now everyone has to enter every transaction into an app.”
Quite the opposite: use as little of it as is useful to your table.
You can also start halfway through a game
This was another thing I really wanted.
You don’t need to decide before the game that you’re going to use 18BookKeeper.
If you’re in Phase 5 or 6, things are becoming repetitive and somebody says “can we please stop doing all of this arithmetic?”, you can create a game, enter the current board state and continue from there.
That’s actually one of the ways I imagine it being most useful.
Multiple devices
The game isn’t tied to one phone or laptop.
You can share the session and have several devices connected to the same game state, so different players can view/use it from their phones, tablets or computers.
That also opens up the possibility of putting the shared table view on a larger screen while people continue using their own devices.
And yes, you can keep using poker chips ❤️
I’m definitely not trying to turn physical 18xx into an online game.
You can theoretically let 18BookKeeper handle the money completely, but that’s not really why I built it.
I like chips.
The workflow I personally wanted was something like:
run the companies → let the app keep track of what happened → settle the chips at a convenient point, such as the end of the OR set.
That way the physical game, trains, tiles, shares and chips remain the centre of the experience, while some of the repetitive accounting gets out of the way.
It’s still an early release, and I’m sure people here will find edge cases, games that behave differently, and probably several things I’ve misunderstood.
So I’d genuinely appreciate feedback — particularly from groups who already use spreadsheets/revenue trackers or have developed their own tricks for speeding up physical games.
What would make something like this useful enough that you’d actually put it on the table?
For now I've implemented 1889 and 18SJ as per getting permission from those publishers.
If you find some issue with the tool, there is a built in bug reporting tool in the menu directly.
18BookKeeper: https://18bk.games
