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.

I have had no luck on the app so far. The search is worse. But you can still use your browser on your phone, login to your instance and do what I'll tell you.

Take a look at this:

https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/1470

and this:

https://lemmy.one/post/1600

Basically, you gotta search for your community in the format !community@instance (for example, !football@lemmy.ml)

Once you search it this way, erase the search and search again only for the name 'community'. It will come up. Maybe give it 10s between the first search and the second one.

This happens because it needs to be indexed by the instance first. At least one person in a given instance must have at least searched for it already in order for it to come up. After that, everyone is able to simply search for 'community'.

If you say that is hard and overcomplicates things, I'll agree with you. I think it could be better, but I don't know if it's possible.