BoardGameGeek is the place to go for board game information.
There, done; you can go now.
Oh, you want more…?
Okay then, BoardGameGeek (BGG) is the premier site for information, opinions, discussions, and a lot more about everything board game related, and https://BoardGameGeek.com/ should be bookmarked on your browser. (Alongside https://zatu.com/, of course.)
It has been around for about 25 years and includes data on well over 100,000 board and card games. The New York Times described it as ‘the hub of board gaming on the internet,’ and who am I to argue with that? https://BoardGameGeek.com/wiki/page/Welcome_to_BoardGameGeek does a pretty good job of summarising BGG and I won’t repeat it here; instead, I’ll take a look at one game and show what you can find about and around it.
Before I start, while you don’t have to register to use most of the site, becoming a member does have benefits (and it’s free, though the organisation will gladly accept donations to keep this useful resource up and running).
Wingspan
Coming rather late to the game (so to speak), I discovered Wingspan only a few months ago. The first thing I did was head to https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan, which looks like this:
It’s a long page, and I’ve chopped out huge chunks (shown by the dotted lines). There’s a lot of information here, but I’d like to draw your attention to a few things in particular (outlined in red):
1) The ‘quickbar’—if you’re logged in, you can park shortcuts to your favourite games there (in this case, you can see what I’m into at the moment).
2) BGG score—a measure of what folk on the site (the subset who submitted ratings, anyway) thought about the game on average; a score of 8 (out of 10) is high praise indeed. Of course, different people have different preferences, but if you know nothing about a game, this can be a crude barometer.
3) If you happen to use RSS feeds, there’s a convenient link to a feed for each game, updating you on related forum discussions, etc., meaning you don’t have to keep checking the page for news.
4) While game boxes and stores will tell you how many players a game is for, BGG users will give you their idea of the best number of players. Again, it depends on the playing group, and in my admittedly limited experience, Wingspan’s fine with 2–4 players, drags with 5, and solo is a bit boring, so I guess 3 is a decent figure.
5) Similarly, game boxes will give you an age range, which we can use as a proxy for difficulty (and possibly theming), but the BGG complexity score provides another measure. It’s somewhat abstract and probably best used in comparison with games you already know.
6) There’s a vast range of other information about the game farther down (most of which I’ve elided in the screenshot). This menu provides access to more than the highlights in this overview; I find the videos section particularly useful, especially reviews and tutorials, and the rules booklets are usually available in the files section. (You do need to be logged on to the site to download files.) You’ll also find fan expansions and compilations of house rules in the files and forums sections, which can be useful when you’ve played the game a few times and want a bit more.
7) People who want a quick idea of what sort of game it is can make use of the BGG classification, though I would expect most visitors to the page to already have a handle on this.
8) Most games include links to the publisher and other relevant ‘official’ sites; often there’s not a huge amount there, but some publishers (such as Stonemaier) provide a lot of helpful material.
9) The ‘fans also like’ list can be helpful in letting you see how this game might sit with others you have, or might encourage you to expand Zatu’s revenues—er, I mean, expand your collection.
Shopping links also appear on the page but they’re mainly US stores; there’s a very useful browser add-on called ‘BGG Price Checker’ which lights up on game pages and includes more country-specific stores (though not all possibilities) and takes (single item) postage into account in its figures, which the BGG links don’t.
Other stuff on the site For folk interested in brand new stuff, https://BoardGameGeek.com/crowdfunding highlights some Kickstarter projects and the like, and there are a few email newsletters which can keep you updated on progress.
If you register on the site, you can also contribute your own content, whether that’s merely listing and rating the games you own or engaging in discussions, all the way to uploading reviews and blog posts, as well as editing game pages. There’s a rudimentary email system for contacting other users and a marketplace, though as with the stores mentioned above, this is mainly US focussed, so perhaps not useful this side of the pond.
I confess I don’t make a lot of use of these facilities, and the primary benefit for me is researching a game before parting with my hard-earned cash.
As a small aside, there are a couple of related sites, RPGGeek and VideoGameGeek, which provide similar services for (not surprisingly) RPGs and video games. They don’t seem quite as polished, but BGG is absolutely the number one place to go for board game information.
So, there you have it: BoardGameGeek is an essential repository of board and card game information and a valuable aid in purchase decision making.
