My grandfather taught me board games on boards he made himself. Not the kind you buy at a store. Hand-drawn grids on scrap wood, stones and buttons for pieces, rules explained from memory. Those games stuck with me longer than anything that came in a box.
I grew up playing abstract strategy games with my kids the same way. No dice, no luck, just two people thinking. But where I live, not many people play these kinds of games. Finding an opponent for Tablut or Fanorona isn't something you can do at a local game night.
So I started building. First in Python, running locally on my machine. Those took months. I carved boards with a CNC router, printed pieces on a 3D printer, and drew SVG layouts for games most people have never heard of. The physical side was satisfying, but the audience was small.
With the help of AI, I've been able to build web versions of these games much faster than I ever could alone. What used to take months now takes days. The entire platform runs on free infrastructure. No accounts. No tracking. No ads. Just games.
Every game on this site is free to play, forever. The source code is open source on GitHub under the MIT license. I'm not building a business. I'm building something I wish existed when I was looking for someone to play Surakarta with.