BoardGameGeek (BGG) is an online forum for board gaming hobbyists and a game database that holds reviews, images and videos for over 125,600 different tabletop games, including European-style board games, wargames, and card games. In addition to the game database, the site allows users to rate games on a 1–10 scale and publishes a ranked list of board games. According to Brett Boge, the website...
- ...consists of a database of more than fifty thousand board games along with their developers and players. The games themselves are heavily linked to the users through lists called GeekLists, along with owned/played/wanted etc. connections, ratings, reviews, session reports and other information (both quantitative and qualitative). The data also contains information regarding the games themselves include genre, number of players, difficulty, length etc.
As of 10 March 2019, boardgamegeek.com has an Alexa rank of 1,745.
History[]
BoardGameGeek was founded in January 2000 by Scott Alden and Derk Solko, and marked its 20th anniversary on 20 January 2020.
Since 2005, BoardGameGeek hosts an annual board game convention, BGG.CON, that has a focus on playing games, and where winners of the Golden Geek Awards are announced. New games are showcased and convention staff is provided to teach rules. There is also an annual Spring BGG.CON which is family friendly, and an annual BGG@Sea which is held on a cruise.
In 2010, BoardGameGeek received the Diana Jones Award, which recognized it as "a resource without peer for board and card gamers, the recognized authority of this online community." The New York Times has called BoardGameGeek "the hub of board gaming on the internet."
In 2020, BoardGameGeek was inducted into the Origins Award Hall of Fame.
The site has branched out into other fields by using the same system for RPGs and video games (rpggeek.com and videogamegeek.com).
The Gaming Goat[]
On September 9, 2021, BGG moderators permanently locked the accounts of Greg Mahler and The Gaming Goat CEO Jeff Bergen over backlash of a Kickstarter campaign that featured white nationalist dogwhistles. This came after the Kickstarter was launched on the 7th of September, immediately drawing backlash from the board game enthusiast community. A megathread was started on BGG’s forum by verified designer Michael (@thecrazyscotsman) to collect information regarding Mahler, Bergen, and The Gaming Goat, along with BGG’s official response. BGG’s official response acknowledged the ‘history of behavior that directly conflicts with BGG’s community values.’ (@Octavian, 2021)
Users praised BGG for their quick handling of the situation, with many more providing more evidence as detailed in the megathread, which was updated accordingly.
Kick the Table (2013-2021)[]
On December 15, 2013 BGG launched “The Last Kick” (later named to Kick The Table – A Kickstarter Monitor) a weekly summary of Kickstarter projects for board games. The intent was to help spread visibility and news surrounding board game projects on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website. It was posted by Mike Minutillo (@codermike).
It was shuttered on February 21, 2021 after Kickstarter updated its site and made it impossible to track information for these weekly updates (Minutillo, 2021). At its end it had linked to ‘nearly 6,000 campaigns and following links to those campaigns over 3.5 million times’ (Minutillo, 2021). This blog also sported 5,431 subscribers at the time of closing.