A shelf, not a service.

Twenty-one titles: eleven classics whose rules are centuries old, and ten made for this shelf, five of them under the Board.game Originals label. Every title has a five-minute lesson, a rules reference you can open mid-game, and a computer opponent with rungs from gentle to unkind.

Gabriele Masetti. The games, their rules engines and computer opponents, the site, and the key art were all made in-house; nothing on these pages was bought in or generated from a template.

The rules of every game are code, and code with tests: a move the rules would not allow cannot be made, whichever way you are playing. The computer opponent thinks in positions rather than seconds, so it is exactly as strong on a slow phone as on a fast laptop, and the same position at the same rung gets the same reply. Every number on a card — how long a game takes, how often a rung beats the one below it — is printed by a script kept with the code, and the card quotes only what the script printed.

Your board — the games you left half-finished, your replays, your record, your name at the table — lives in this browser’s own storage, and My Board will hand it to you as a file to take somewhere else. There are no accounts, no analytics script and no cookies set by these pages.

One thing does leave the browser. At a table other people join, your moves and your table talk pass through a relay that forwards them to the other browsers at that table; it never sees a position, keeps a room in memory only, and forgets it when the last person leaves or after an hour of silence. That is the whole list. Even the typefaces are served from here.

A rule you think is wrong, a game you think belongs here, a table that did something strange: write to the maker at gabriele.xyz.