I want to ramble about a cool website, but to truly set my emotions we've gotta go back in time a little bit. Stick with me on this one.
Anyone remember OMGPOP? At its core it was just a flash game site with a few dozen original games. It had a lot of different things. The most popular one seemed to be Balloono, which was basically just Bomberman. All of the games were multiplayer in some way, with live chat available. That's not the coolest part.
All of it was cohesive. Not necessarily thematically, but it all used a single account system with a joined XP and rewards system. You could use the coins you got from playing a game to get cosmetics for a different game. (You could also spend real money for them. I never did this, I didn't have real money at the time.) It was more than just a game site, it was a whole social thing.
It was also the first time I experienced internet popularity - I made a thread on the forum asking for a ridiculous 1,000 tips/tricks to get good at the match 3 game on the site, Swapples. It actually did end up garnering dozens and dozens of responses, both serious and jokey. Maybe it actually made it to 1,000 at some point, I don't actually know. This was years ago.
And then the bane of all good happened - company buyouts. Zynga purchased the entirety of OMGPOP, stole Draw My Thing for its mobile app push, and shut the site down only a year later! Fuck Zynga. Fuck em.
Fast forward. You're me, bored as fuck, remembering cool online games from your past. (Remember Yahoo's game site? Remember the weird as fuck Columns clone? That shit was wild.) You re-stumble upon OMGPOP, and you wonder: could there be another?
Well, there's MOBCPOP. It rehosts some but not all of OMGPOP's games. It's a great little project, but it's JUST the games. It's missing just about everything else, no cohesive account with unlocks to get or anything neat on the side. Not exactly what you're looking for, but worth noting down.
But what if the game selection didn't have to be the exact same? If the account system is truly the most important part to my search, surely I'd be ok if the most popular game on the site was just chess. Right?
You'd be entirely correct. Enter Foony, which is quite literally exactly that. It's very reminiscent of OMGPOP, with its own slightly disappointing game selection.
Before we move on, let me date myself: this was written in September 2023. The site at this time is actively being updated, so the game selection has likely expanded.
I say slightly disappointing, because once you get past the "aww, they don't have an (insert game type here)?" it's an absolutely livable game selection.
You've got chess, checkers, Connect 4, Battleship, and Uno. That's about half of the lineup. Classic table games. Iconic and always good to see, especially Uno, but certainly not groundbreaking. I've spent an odd amount of time playing checkers recently, it's been great.
You've also got a typing racing game, which is a little boring and also kinda sucks if you have chronic hand pain. I can't do more than one round and I wouldn't care to anyhow.
Then you've got what I consider The Good Stuff. These games are fucking GAMES. You'll play em.
First off, Pop-a-Word. It's a simple word game, you get 6 letters and you gotta make words out of em. If you've ever played the 2001 PC game Text Twist, you know what it is. You get 90 seconds to do so, and since it is multiplayer, it's entirely competitive. A racing mode for Text Twist is not what I expected to capture me, but it took an hour off my day a few times already.
Next, Dino-Mite. I talked about Balloono earlier, the Bomberman clone. This is that. Bomberman is infinitely replayable, so this is a slam dunk inclusion for a website like this. Honestly, what else do I add? It's Bomberman dude, I can't say anything else, we all already know it's good!
Finally, Paintjob. It's the previously passingly mentioned Draw My Thing. One person draws a thing, everyone else has to guess it. This is absolutely the most fun game in the set for me, and it's also the only one that REQUIRES a second player. All the others either replace the opponent(s) with bot(s) or just play as a high score challenge.
That being said, the original Draw My Thing and Zynga's Draw Something are missing something that Paintjob has: custom word sets.
Paintjob is a product of right now. We can look back at how drawing games used to play and see why they might eventually lose steam. The easiest thing you can do to prolong something with a creative endeavor is to make it relate to something people care about.
Someone made a custom word list that just has every Pokemon on it. Nothing else. High respect.
You can just make a list of the things you care about from a media you like and just fuckin go for it. A few other drawing games have this, so it's not an original idea, but who cares, you can force everyone to draw things from your favorite anime or game or movie.
Paintjob isn't the only custom content game here either. Dino-Mite allows for custom level creation, so you can play Bomberman on whatever fucked up arena you can imagine. This made for some good fun the time I ended up in a lobby with this enabled.
Unfortunately, this does also make for a Bomberman game that has the Mario Maker effect - the easier it is to make a level, the more bad levels that will exist. And someone'll have the pleasure to play them. Thankfully, this is pretty bearable in Bomberman.
While the other games don't have this level of custom content, they do all have a solid amount of settings. What if Uno, but you need to keep your cards? What if chess had a time limit of 60 seconds total? Pop-a-Word might be too hard, so move it down to 5 letters max! Or up to 7 letters! This website has 5 versions of fucking checkers. What does that even mean.
With all that said, the game count is still kinda lacking. You can only get distracted by Connect 4 for so long before you remember the lack of anything related to: pool, match-3s, block droppers, racing, just anything of larger sustenance. OMGPOP had a few dozen games, Foony has 9 and the selection seems limited.
Hey, remember when I said that this was written in September 2023 and the site is getting active updates so the selection might expand? Yeah, it's getting actively updated.
Foony actually has a pretty big roadmap by this point in time, although it's largely disorganized. Right now the team is working on mobile website optimizations and reformatting, and the next big update after that will be game 10, which will be 8-ball pool.
All that is to say, this website isn't finished. It will be continuously updated with new games and features, and the team is taking suggestions and bug reports on their Discord. (With pretty good turnaround on the bugs, too.) And with what's currently available, it's definitely good boredom repellent if nothing else.
Uh, well...hm...well...
...yes, actually! A discord server I'm in tends to do some multiplayer gaming often, and there was nothing happening at the time. So I sent out a ping, put the invite link down, and ended up playing Uno for a solid hour and a half with a party of 6, as well as a rando or two joining the lobby from Foony's site.
Side note, we moved to modded Minecraft afterwards, and I've decided I'm really into Botania so far. Maybe more on that later.
Someone made the comparison to OMGPOP without me having to, several people immediately created accounts (and unearthed a few glitches when doing so), and we had a good time yelling at each other over card draws and discord gifs and one of the players also playing a round of riichi mahjong at the same time (and losing badly).
It's also worth mentioning that this play session wasn't meant to prove a point, I just wanted to play Uno with the gang. I completely forgot I was writing this article.
All of this is to say that a website with simple multiplayer games absolutely holds water. The games themselves being solid and simple makes it easy for people to jump in given an invite link and nothing else, and the added account system and unlockables makes it a perfect glue trap for weirdoes like me.
I gotta get my fox checkers man. I gotta get them.
Is Foony worth checking out? Absolutely! Is it perfect? Hell no! Does it matter? Yes, but they're working on it, so I can cut some slack. It's the kind of place I can believe in, there's not really a free game place to hang out as much as there used to be. And it's just fun. It's something I can support, and I'd like to keep doing so.
Also, I get to best people at checkers. I've found I'm really good at checkers. Fight me in checkers.