BGG Reviews Scraper — Board Game Ratings & Comments

Extract BoardGameGeek reviews and ratings in bulk — reviewer, star rating, full comment text, plus per-game stats (average rating, BGG rank, complexity weight) — using BGG's own official public XML API. No login, no cookies, no API key, and no browser automation, so there's nothing fragile to break.

What this actor does

• Accepts any mix of BGG numeric id (174430), boardgamegeek.com URL (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174430/gloomhaven), or plain game name ("Gloomhaven", auto-resolved via BGG's search API).
• Paginates reliably using BGG's own totalitems count (no cursor guesswork, no loop-detection hacks needed — the API tells you exactly how many pages exist).
• Outputs one clean, flat record per review/rating plus a per-game stats summary (average rating, Bayes average, BGG rank, complexity weight, total ratings).
• Retries transient network/5xx/429/202 (queued) responses with backoff, and fails fast on permanent errors instead of wasting compute.
• Works entirely off BGG's public API — no proxies needed.

Who this is for

• Publishers & Kickstarter creators tracking sentiment on their own games.
• Retailers & distributors gauging demand and reception before stocking a title.
• Board game reviewers & YouTubers researching a game before covering it.
• Data scientists building recommendation or sentiment datasets from tabletop data.

Input

Field	Type	Description
games	array of strings	Required. BGG ids, boardgamegeek.com URLs, or game names.
maxCommentsPerGame	integer	Max reviews/ratings to collect per game. Default 200.
mode	ratingcomments | comments	ratingcomments (default) only returns comments that include a numeric rating. comments returns every comment, rating may be blank.
includeGameStats	boolean	Push one extra per-game stats summary record. Default true.
requestDelayMs	integer	Delay between requests. Default 1000 (BGG asks API consumers to keep request rates conservative).

Example input

{
  "games": ["174430", "https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/224517/brass-birmingham", "Wingspan"],
  "maxCommentsPerGame": 300,
  "mode": "ratingcomments"
}

Output

One dataset item per review:

{
  "gameId": "174430",
  "gameName": "Gloomhaven",
  "username": "alice",
  "rating": 10,
  "comment": "Amazing game, best of the year.",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-16T10:00:00.000Z"
}

Plus one stats summary per game:

{
  "type": "GAME_SUMMARY",
  "gameId": "174430",
  "gameName": "Gloomhaven",
  "yearPublished": 2017,
  "usersRated": 52341,
  "average": 8.62,
  "bayesAverage": 8.42,
  "averageWeight": 3.87,
  "numComments": 9000,
  "owned": 80000,
  "overallRank": 2,
  "reviewsScrapedThisRun": 300,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-16T10:00:00.000Z"
}

Download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or push them straight to your own database via Apify's integrations.

Notes

This actor reads only publicly available review text and public usernames via BGG's official thing endpoint — the same data visible to anyone on the game's BGG page. Use responsibly and in line with BGG's terms of use and applicable data-protection law in your jurisdiction. Not affiliated with or endorsed by BoardGameGeek/Geekdo.