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!