The origin story.

Some of you might be wondering… why backgammon? It's actually pretty simple. I wanted a digital way to play backgammon with my friends and couldn’t find it.. so I decided to build it. Like many businesses, this one was born out of a personal frustration. Believe it or not, FriendGammon is the first and only *usable* app for playing backgammon with friends. (There are a couple other apps that claim to have a “play with friends” feature, but the feature doesn’t work.) And now, for the full story... If you’re familiar with backgammon boards, you know that most of them are quite large and not easy to transport. So naturally, you start scrolling through the App Store for an app to play with friends. I found one that let you pass the phone back and forth, but decided that was lame - what if you're not in the same physical space? A number of other apps seemed to have a "play with friends" feature, but it later became apparent that the feature didn't work (IE, the game would randomly disappear). After a couple days of trying to play on apps that didn’t work, frustration become and enlightenment, and I said "f*uck it, I'll do it myself". I scraped some money together and handed it over to Yari Labs, along with my handmade sketches, who built the FriendGammon MVP. When I say handmade sketches, I really mean handmade sketches... (Yes, I know about Figma... now!)

Over the course of this blog, I’ll address both the business side of FriendGammon and the game itself. Come along for the ride… xx Luiza