Anywhere Board Games

Introduction and Latest News

Anywhere Board Games (ABG) is an open source web app intended to replicate the experience of a bunch of friends sitting around a table playing their favorite board and card games... but on computers. Unlike other gaming environments, we had a peculiar vision: projecting the main board on our table and using laptops or tablets to control our hands (with other friends joining in remotely). So to use ABG, download it onto one of your own machines, run it (which starts a local web server) and then have other machines and tablets in your house connect to your local server.

We're working hard to get all the features in place (please see the Release Notes for the latest state). The stand-alone ABG Web app can now has:

Support multiple simultaneous HTML 5 clients
Support for hand-held devices (iPhone, iPad, Android)
Allowing users to import their own pieces and cards
Allowing pieces and cards to be flipped, rotated, have multiple sides, rolled, stacked, and shuffled
Allowing players to hide their hands behind shields (but sent to the back in their local browsers)
Saving and loading the board between sessions

Latest News

02/16/2018 - Quick update (mostly to remove old Hangout information).

01/21/2017 - Google has decided to shut down 3rd party applications for Google Hangouts on April 25th. Anywhere Board Games will still work as a stand-alone PHP application after that date.

02/14/2015 - Fun update to make pieces easier to manipulate: Hit SHIFT with clicking to select all pieces under the cursor. Hold SHIFT to scoop up pieces as you drag, hit CTRL to pick up another single piece, and hit SPACE to drop the lowest piece.

11/26/2014 - Quick Hangout Fix: Google changed the location of their Hangout API, so we needed to update the location (sorry for the temporary outage and thanks to Ransey for pointing it out!)

10/25/2014 - New Hangout Source Update! Chrome improved their security again, so you can't load HTTP requests in an HTTPS page. So we had to move our board files to an HTTPS server (Dropbox). If you can't load your board right now, move it into a public directory in Dropbox and it will work.

07/31/2014 - Inspired by Ransey's input, we were able to dramatically speed up response on Google Hangouts by pooling queued updates together. In addition we fixed a bug with stacking pieces causing freezes, and increased rebustness (allowing you to save board state if something unexpected occurs).

Older News

Please Support Board Game Producers

The idea is to enjoy and encourage more people to play board and card games, not to put companies out of business. No copyrighted material is distributed with ABG. Please play games that you own, and support the developers of the games you like!

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