Star Realms Tracker

Star Realms is a great deck-building game with a terrible memory: when a match ends, all you know is who won. This tracker takes the game log, parses it, and shows you how — authority progression turn by turn, deck growth by faction, mission completions marked with stars on the chart, and a history of every game with winners and final scores.

I’d always wanted analytics for my game stats, but parsing the log files was the kind of fun intellectual puzzle I never found the energy for outside of work. So instead (as I wrote in SaaS is dead) I dropped a collection of log files into Claude, told it to write a parser, and iterated from there into a Rails app I can paste new logs into. No logins, no multi-tenant hosting, no figuring out how to monetise it.

The parser extracts player names, turn counts, authority changes (both losses from attacks and gains from cards like Federal Transport), and card acquisitions and scraps by faction. Complete logs are stored alongside the parsed stats, so old games can be re-parsed as the parser improves.

How it was built

A Rails app with SQLite for persistence and Chart.js for the interactive charts, wrapped in a suitably spacey theme — animated starfield, neon accents. The interesting part is the log parser: Star Realms logs are a semi-structured stream of events, so parsing them is a pile of pattern matching with a lot of test cases from real games. Deployed with Kamal to startracker.ideasasylum.com.