A quick script.
I play a lot of board games. With the whole COVID-19 mess, I’ve been playing a lot on Board Game Arena, which is a wonderful site. But one thing that’s a bit lacking is having ratings / metadata about games to great games I’ve just not heard about before. Where can you get lots of that data? Board Game Geek!
The problem though, is merging the two. So, how do we do it? Well, this time around, I’m going to start with this GeekList that someone else maintains of BGA games on BGG. Which has the games, but no ranks. And apparently there are no ways to rank those by BGG (for some reason). But that’s easy when you know a bit of scripting!
Relevant BGG APIs (yes, I know there’s a version 2):
- /xmlapi/geeklist/:id - retrieve information about a GeekList
- /xmlapi/boardgame/:id?stats=1 - without
stats=1, you get lots of game information, but not the rankings
From there, I’m going to use some Python (it’s what I know best), with requests for fetching from the API and xml.etree for XML parsing. I swear there should be a more elegant way for the latter, but again, it works.
Plug everything together and:
import requests
import sys
from xml.etree import ElementTree as et
rankings = {}
for list in sys.argv[1:]:
response = requests.get(f'https://www.boardgamegeek.com/xmlapi/geeklist/{list}')
xml = et.fromstring(response.text)
for item_el in xml.findall('item'):
game_id = item_el.attrib['objectid']
game_name = item_el.attrib['objectname']
sys.stderr.write(f'Loading {game_name} ({game_id})\n')
game_response = requests.get(f'https://www.boardgamegeek.com/xmlapi/boardgame/{game_id}?stats=1')
game_xml = et.fromstring(game_response.text)
for rank_el in game_xml.findall('.//rank'):
try:
rank_name = rank_el.attrib['friendlyname']
rank_value = int(rank_el.attrib['value'])
except ValueError:
continue
if rank_name not in rankings:
rankings[rank_name] = []
rankings[rank_name].append((rank_value, game_name))
for ranking, games in rankings.items():
print(f'===== {ranking} =====')
for i, (score, game) in enumerate(sorted(games), 1):
print(f'{i: <5} {score: <5} {game}')
print()
In summary:
- Fetch the geek list
- Iterate through
itemelements (these contain the items in the list)- For each, get the
objectid(which is a game) - Fetch that game, including
stats=1 - For each list the game is on (overall, best strategy etc), store the ranking information
- For each, get the
- Sort and print the information we collected
The first column is just numbering, the second is BGG rank overall within that category (so Through The Ages: A New Story of Civilization is the 8th highest ranked game on BGG as of now), and the last is the name.
It’s pretty nice:
===== Board Game Rank =====
1 8 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
2 16 Terra Mystica
3 17 7 Wonders Duel
4 28 Puerto Rico
5 39 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
6 41 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar
7 49 Clans of Caledonia
8 54 Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization
9 63 The Voyages of Marco Polo
10 65 Race for the Galaxy
...
===== Family Game Rank =====
1 3 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
2 4 Lost Ruins of Arnak
3 9 7 Wonders
4 16 Stone Age
5 17 Welcome To...
6 22 Jaipur
7 29 Santorini
8 35 Carcassonne
9 39 Kingdomino
10 43 Nidavellir
...
===== Strategy Game Rank =====
1 8 Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
2 15 Terra Mystica
3 18 7 Wonders Duel
4 27 Puerto Rico
5 39 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
6 41 Clans of Caledonia
7 42 Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar
8 47 Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization
9 50 Lost Ruins of Arnak
10 52 Teotihuacan: City of Gods
...
===== Abstract Game Rank =====
1 11 Santorini
2 13 Go
3 16 Hive
4 25 Taluva
5 29 Dragon Castle
6 35 Medina (Second Edition)
7 39 Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends
8 46 Chess
9 51 Cribbage
10 52 Xiangqi
...
===== Party Game Rank =====
1 25 Skull
2 45 Coup
3 52 Perudo
4 56 Concept
5 75 Oriflamme
6 93 The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow
7 117 Saboteur
8 478 Scum: The Food Chain Game
9 572 Fluxx
===== Customizable Rank =====
1 73 Krosmaster: Arena
===== Thematic Rank =====
1 63 Dungeon Petz
2 173 K2
3 227 Rallyman: GT
4 303 Room 25
5 531 NOIR: Deductive Mystery Game
6 576 Penny Press
===== War Game Rank =====
1 25 Unconditional Surrender! World War 2 in Europe
2 65 Polis: Fight for the Hegemony
===== Children's Game Rank =====
1 132 Monster Factory
2 811 Connect Four
3 831 Battleship
I’ve played quite a few of these (and most of them were great!) but there are all sorts of ones I didn’t even know were on BGA. All the games!
Next, I want to write something to scrape BGA (they don’t have an official API, but that’s workaroundable) and combine both data sets into something even better. The joys of scripting things.