Faith Morante Built a Board Game Community — and Leveled Up Her Leadership Along the Way

In 2021, Faith Morante had a collection of board games and nobody to play them with.

The pandemic had emptied the tables of friends and colleagues she normally gathered around games with. She also wanted a place where players could compare strategies, share reviews and challenge one another across titles — a resource that did not exist in the form she wanted. So she built it herself. Ain't Board, her board game community website, was born out of that gap.

In this story, Morante, a Senior Software Engineer who has been with X-Team for over three years, explains how Ain't Board works, how she built it while working full-time and what X-Team's own culture of bounties and rewards shaped the product she made.

From Quadropolis to a Full Community Platform

Morante's path to board game obsession began at her previous job around 2017, when a colleague introduced her to Quadropolis — a game she describes as entirely unlike Monopoly or chess. She was immediately drawn to the components, the strategy and the social energy it generated at the table. She began building a collection, working her way from accessible titles like Codenames to demanding ones like Brass: Lancashire.

Brass: Lancashire has since become her favorite. "It's like Monopoly, but a thousand times better," she says. She is also eager to try its sequel, Brass: Birmingham, which holds a top-10 ranking on BoardGameGeek, a site she visits regularly to discover new games.

When the pandemic arrived around 2021 and in-person play became impossible, she created Ain't Board as a community website. The platform currently features editorial and user-generated Reviews and Strategies — anyone can write a review of a board game — alongside a Challenges system. Users post challenges such as "Get 100 points in Brass: Lancashire," and others who complete them earn PowerUps that unlock special avatars. In the future, PowerUps will be redeemable for free board games, collectibles and cafe passes.

The Challenges mechanic was not invented from scratch. "The X-Team Bounties and its Vault actually inspired the idea of Challenges and PowerUps," she says. "I love the idea of friendly competition with incentives."

Building the Site While Working Full-Time

Because Morante works full-time for X-Team, efficiency was essential. Rather than building Ain't Board alone, she hired junior developers and supervised them through the build. The experience sharpened her leadership skills in ways client work had not. "Supervising them and providing guidance helped improve my leadership skills quite a bit," she says.

The tech stack reflects a lean, cost-conscious approach. The site runs on Next.js for both frontend and backend, with MongoDB as the database. Currently the team only pays for domain hosting.

X-Team's support has been more than technical inspiration. The compensation and flexibility of remote work gave her both the financial stability and the calendar freedom to invest in Ain't Board. Her X-Team client also runs a large automotive editorial, and watching how that editorial was managed gave her concrete ideas for running a board game content platform.

The platform is hitting its near-term target of 10 or more users a day. SEO optimization and UX improvements are the next priorities before new features ship.

The Features Taking Ain't Board Further

Morante's roadmap is ambitious. Several features are in development or already underway:

A Game Night Matcher — she describes it as Tinder for board game meetups — is being built in partnership with Turquoise Goat Cafe in Vancouver. Challenge Leaderboards will surface who has completed the most challenges. Board Game Leaderboards will work like the ranking systems on chess.com but for tabletop games. Board Game Recommendations will pull from both users and Morante herself.

A giveaway with Doomlings — offering their card game for free through a few simple steps — is also running, a sign that Ain't Board is already attracting external brand partnerships.

The priority, though, is market fit before feature sprawl. "I have so many features in mind, but I need to find market-fit first," she says. It is the kind of product discipline that translates directly from professional engineering into side-project work — the same instinct that keeps a codebase clean keeps a roadmap honest.

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