Open custom game lobbies have been added to the home page, with small adjustments to make the headings more compact and fit on a mobile screen width.
Clicking on the “Board Size” and “Game Speed” toggles also filter the custom game lobbies shown.
(?) Remove the existing “Play” page from existence.
Other changes:
Play → My Games
Add a new page and link to the main menu, under the “Play” menu: “My Games” or “Ongoing Games”.
Users’ ongoing games, which were previously (currently at the time of writing this post) displayed on the main screen, would be located here.
[EDIT 2026-03-31] Based on @_KoBa’s suggestion, clicking on “Play” directly can redirect to “Play → My Games” if the user has 1 or more ongoing games with a pending move, otherwise it redirects to the home page like in lichess.org.
This page should also list recently finished games so users who don’t play correspondence games won’t stare at a totally blank page.
Users who haven’t played a single game yet can be redirected to the home page or faced with some helpful text similar to a “404 Not Found” page.
A feature request by @TangJieHao: there can also be options/filters to see friends’ ongoing games on this page.
main menu adjustments
Remove “Home” from the main menu. Clicking the OGS logo already redirects the user to the home page, as well as “Play” after the above changes.
Add a new submenu “Site” and move “What’s New”, “Support OGS”, “About”, “GitHub”, and “Documentation & FAQ” from the “Community” menu to it.
Rationale:
[EDIT 2026-04-01] added this section
[A] Why a all-in-one home page?
centralized landing page for new users, especially beginners who don’t know how to get started with Go. It’s a relatively common concern I see in OGS’ global chatroom.
social hub / sense of liveliness with real-time updates in the Watch Live Game widget (lower left corner), Open Custom Games UI (center), and Streamers widget (top right corner).
The current home page for users who don’t play correspondence games is a blank screen:
[B] Why remove the current Play page and reduce it to a small UI?
Minimize confusion for beginners by reducing number of buttons/options for automatch.
This would also lead to faster matchmatching at the cost of less customizability for automatch, which is why the “Custom Game” button and a list of open custom games are very close by.
Currently I have to constantly scroll down and up the Play page to see which automatch setting has a player waiting (indicated by a green dot) and which custom games are available. Compactness would be more convenient in this case, to find an available opponent faster.
Currently users can’t even see all of the settings for custom games on vertically-oriented mobile screens without scrolling:
[todo] Design a mockup for the “Play → My Games”. It would be the same as the existing Home page except with a UI to filter or navigate to Friends’ ongoing games and users’ own finished games in place of the player card widget.
[todo] Design a mockup for modal that appears when “Custom Game ” is clicked.
[todo] Show a “Get Started” widget in place of the player card for unregistered players.
considerations
[?] Keep the existing Play page and dedicate it to finding and exploring custom games, with graph view, more filters, etc. There’s potential to expand this to include variant games too, merging with govariants.com
[?] Separate “Daily Correspondence” from automatch UI and leave it on the separate, existing Play page.
As said elsewhere, correspondence players like to see thumbnails with their ongoing games, so that they can decide if they want to play a move now (because they don’t have much time left on the clock, or because it’s an easy move), or if that can wait.
About Fischer time, see this thread
which shows that people like Fischer about as much as byo-yomi. On the other hand
Data is often too easy to misinterpret, and I think even here you misinterpreted it slightly.
This skews the data towards Fischer unfairly, and Byo-yomi still was close to winning for 19x19. I’m also not sure whether the data includes the effect of confusing beginners with two very different time settings. The first few times I used automatch this year, I didn’t even realize the left side time settings (30s + 5s) were Fischer until the game started, and I’ve been playing on OGS since 2022.
I’m not against using data, I’m against overly relying on data-driven development for design. It’s how engineers can compensate for limited artistic abilities as well as it’s a way to show progress in companies, but by definition it replaces intuition with empirical evidence, which can be counterproductive in some cases. Intuition is very powerful, especially compared to skewed, incomplete, or misused data sets.
Yes, this is the way. Disregarding preferences, this is better for faster matching.
Valid concern. I’ll think about it. One possibility is a setting for “Pending move” that only considers a move as pending if there’s 1 day, 2 days, or 12 hours left to play your move.
Unfortunately, I can’t afford to spend more time in the next few weeks to study the codebase and do it myself since I haven’t contributed to the GitHub for OGS before. I need to focus on coding my own site. I’m relying on @anoek and company to take it from here, maybe after one or two more drafts/mockups.
Then clicking “Play” in the main menu can lead to that page (Play → My Games) when the user has at least one ongoing game with a pending move, similar to @JohnnieDarko’s idea. Clicking on “Play” without any ongoing games would lead to the home page.
In my draft, clicking on “Pending Moves” would also lead to Play → My Games, but that can be fully replaced with the Play menu button idea.
Can’t any page be your “landing page” if you just directly go there? I have bookmarks for many sites but it’s not necessarily a bookmark to their landing page.
Sure, I know that, having been on the WWW since 1991 or ’92 … but at the same time there are Web sites that allow me to set my landing page (like, “unread posts” or the like), so if anything here is changed, I’d like to have that option
That one is not related to this re-design, I didn’t touch the code yet. But if I ever take the time to figure out the OGS codebase, I can fix these things instantly. Problem is I’ve got my own websites, game, game server, etc. to fully focus on 24/7. I wish one of the devs would clean up the documentation first, that might motivate me to contribute instead of watching NBA basketball, playing/teaching Go, chatting with friends/strangers, or anything else I do in my limited free time. Also, anoek seems to be on vacation so even if I help out, I’m not sure if the fix would be uploaded to live servers until he comes back.
happened to see this in OGS global chatroom this morning, same as TangJieHao’s feature request:
[ 7:29]ronin3: I wish OGS made it easier to follow one’s fav players
[ 7:29]ronin3: Like a second home screen with only the games of players you follow
By the way, can a few people tell me how they usually find correspondence matches? Is it through ladders, or daily correspondence UI on the play page, or 50-50? This will shape how I design the home page and Play pages.
You can have a look at Play Go at online-go.com! | OGS
Games with a symbol are tournament games, those with are ladder games, and the rest are mostly custom games (see play page) I believe.
quick update, this is what I have so far, only slightly improved over previous draft: I don’t like the scrollbar placement or the fact that there’s so little room for the open correspondence game list.
I’m realizing I need to start learning how to use Figma. I’ve been using GIMP, which is an open-source Photoshop alternative, and it’s the reason why I barely made any progress from the first draft. It’s awful for web design. And I need to make at least 3 different page designs (Home, Play, custom game settings) – it’s gonna take ages with GIMP.
I’m taking a hiatus from studying/playing/teaching Go to become 3 dan+ at web design. It took me almost half a year starting in September 2025 to get good at Go, I’m guessing it’ll take me much less than that to improve OGS frontend. I think this is much easier than Go – the re-design should be fully done in 2 months. Feedback is welcome along the way to shape the final result. v0.1 → v0.2 → v1.0 unless there’s big enough changes to split into a v0.3 thread.
I think Figma is a great skill to have and I think it’s great that you put this much effort into this project!
That said, I’m not too sure about your current design. Too many buttons, not enough widgets.
Too Many Buttons
Forums, Learn to play Go, Groups, etc. all of these things are simple buttons. Buttons usually (except when they trigger a direct action, e.g. “Play”) belong in the navigation bar, not on the page. Putting them there doesn’t really generate value.
Not Enough Widgets
What would create value, would be the home page elements gathered from the Meta Component Anaylsis Table. Of course not all of these are useful and which ones to put on the homepage is to a degree subjective but out of the 32 identified elements your page currently has 4. 4/32 that’s 12.5% of the possible action.
You have the Play directly button (5), Play Bots Button (7), Player stats overview (11), Daily Puzzle Widget (13). Everything else is missing.
According to OGS stats being a 3d Go player means you’re better than 98% of people playing Go. To achieve that in 6 months is amazing.
If Web Design is easier than Go (from your perspective) than you should be able to become better than 98% of people doing Web Design in less than 6 months.
I’m very curious to see if that happens. I’ll definitely stay tuned!
Well yes, I put them there to fill space at first (like how anoek wanted to fill empty space on the home page with mystical Go quotes), and because someone suggested to make the home page a reflection of the main menu.
I should also have made it clear that the re-design is targeted towards beginners who would benefit more from it. I’ve heard more than once that these forums aren’t prominent enough considering how useful they are. Of course regulars like you and me don’t need that button because we already know about the OGS forums. I need a few more opinions on this.
Remember the settings page can also have options to replace those buttons with another widget or a single switch to “turn off beginner-friendly mode”.
Where are you finding this information? And I don’t think it’d be a good idea to fit all 32 elements on one page.
I’m just trying to give you constructive criticism.
As a quick fix this might be alright.
But if this should be the new great startpage design then simply “filling space” is not a good goal IMO.
If I had a web development company and someone suggested that then I’d immediately fire him.
That’s not my point. I’m not saying the content shouldn’t be targeted towards beginners, I’m saying you should use the viewport real estate you have on a desktop computer to place widgets instead of buttons.
For example, instead of having a button “forum”, you could actually show the first entries of the forum like in jlt’s design. And instead of having a button “Learn to play Go” you could have a widget “Learn to play Go” showing a Go board position the user can click on similar like how chess.com did it.
Buttons belong in the navigation bar IMO. I’m sure there are some design principles to be found in the internet that reflect that.
My own analysis in the original thread. I made a list of all Components on chess.com, lichess.org and the proposed ones.
” is clicked.
are tournament games, those with 
are ladder games, and the rest are mostly custom games (see play page) I believe.