Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
Okay, I did a search and I didn’t find any boardgame communities. I had a suspicion, so I checked and there is a boardgame community on lemmygrad. Is it possible that that’s the community you saw? Lemmygrad has been defederated from most instances (including yours, sh.itjust.works) because of their controversial political stances and I believe there were problems with community members bombarding other instances. Anyways, most major instances have defederated from them which means their communities will not show up in your instance searches and you won’t be able to interact with them. If I were you I’d be the change you seek and start a boardgame community! I’d certainly subscribe to it. Things are still new around here so there’s a lot of community building to still be done 🙂 Welcome!
Edit: Oh, and if you want to see what instances your instance is federated with, just click “Instances” on the bottom of your lemmy page. It contains a list of all allowed/banned instances. I went ahead and did the honor - sh.itjust.works only has blocked lemmygrad.
Edit 2: I guess I’m bad at the search too. There are two non-lemmygrad boardgame communities I managed to track down. !boardgames@feddit.de and !soloboardgaming@lemmy.ml. I’ve found that the easiest way to search these things is to find the communities in their home instance itself, then copy the entire URL and just paste it into the search on your instance. That seems to usually work for me. The search is definitely glitchy though.