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Show HN: FreeBoardGames.org – FOSS platform for publishing boardgame.io games

33 points by flamecoals ↗ HN
Hello HN,

I have started FBG some years ago when I moved to the Bay Area and could not find a simple, cross-platform, no-registration way to play board games with my friends back in my home country. I also wanted to make it simple to create multiplayer board games online for developers in their free time.

Shortly after, I found out about boardgame.io with similar goals and decided to join forces with them. It became the engine of our board games, and we focused on publishing/serving them. To be fair with everyone and inspired by Wikipedia, we made the project a non-profit with GPLv3 Affero license.

Since then, the project has gotten many amazing contributors that developed really cool board games, added translations, helped with infra, etc (see https://www.freeboardgames.org/en/about ...). My focus has been on the infrastructure (scaling, adding text chat, etc).

During the pandemic, we saw a large 30x increase in usage, and it also became more useful for me, as I started using it at work for (now virtual) fun team meeting events.

Please check it out and give any feedback!

10 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 42.9 ms ] thread
asicsp
>I also wanted to make it simple to create multiplayer board games online for developers in their free time.

Cool, I have a simple board game to play against computer but I don't know how to make it online multiplayer. I'll check this out.

flamecoals
Feel free to ask any questions for us on discord if you need help!
antifa
Does this require everyone to be at a computer for 2 hours straight or can it be played asynchronously over the course of a day or 2?

Words with friends does this well, except I don't care about scrabble.

flamecoals
If you keep the link, you can always come back to the game, the state will be persisted, as long as you use the same device.

But yes, there are some features missing to better support asynchronous play, i.e. sending an email or notification when it is your turn

chanpatorikku
Being able to play board games with no-registration looks nice.
jithinraj
Awesome work @flamecoals. Neat UI. Would love to explore for a project we are working on.
flamecoals
Thanks! Feel free to reach out to the community on discord
yoavhortman
I've been building a boardgame.io projecy and I find the documentation hard to follow the typescript definition lacking and the framework rigid and tricky to get right. its a shame since the promise of building a board game in a quick and simple way was enticing but the framework doesn't live up to it. perhaps I'm missing something, please prove me wrong.
flamecoals
I am also a boardgame.io maintainer, so happy to hear feedback about it too.

I think the framework has some gotchas and there are some improvements to be made (i.e. the whole thing about player being a string), but I still think it benefits a lot my productivity compared to doing it from scratch. Happy to hear in what cases you think otherwise.