Today we're opening Openturn to everyone. It's a free, open source framework for building turn-based and board games — and a cloud where you can host them with one command.
Why we built it
Turn-based games are special. The cadence — one move, then a pause, then a counter-move — gives space for thought, conversation, and craft. But the tools for shipping them have been stuck for a decade: roll your own server, your own state machine, your own lobby code, your own reconnect logic.
Openturn collapses all of that into a single game definition. You describe the moves and the state; the framework gives you a multiplayer game in a browser, with saves, spectators, and a shareable link.
What's in the alpha
- A core runtime for authoring games as plain TypeScript.
- A free hosted cloud — push a game and it gets a public URL.
- A discover page where players can find games made by the community.
- A bridge for embedding games into other sites.
What we're working on next
- Build more example games
- Iterating on the framework
If you want to build something, the easiest place to start is the discover page — try a few games to get a feel for the framework, then check out the docs to ship your own.
Thanks for being here.