BoardGameGeek (BGG) Board Game Scraper

Scrape board game data from BoardGameGeek — the world's largest board game database with 140,000+ games and 6 million monthly active users. Extract game metadata including categories, mechanics, designers, publishers, alternate names, and more.

What this actor does

This actor retrieves structured board game data from BGG's internal JSON API using residential proxy routing to bypass BGG's datacenter IP blocks (the reason the 3 existing BGG scrapers on Apify plateaued at 2 users each).

Three scraping modes are supported:

• hot — Fetch the top-50 hottest board games from the BGG hotness list. Includes the current BGG rank for each game. Best for weekly trend snapshots.
• search — Search for board games by keyword (e.g. "Wingspan", "dungeon crawler", "deck building"). Returns up to maxItems matching games with full metadata. Note: this endpoint uses boardgamegeek.com which is protected by Cloudflare; results depend on proxy IP quality.
• thing_ids — Fetch specific games by their BGG IDs. The most reliable mode — use it when you have a known list of BGG game IDs.

Input configuration

Field	Type	Description
mode	string	Scraping mode: hot, search, or thing_ids (default: hot)
searchQuery	string	Search keyword — required when mode is search
bggIds	array	BGG game IDs to fetch — required when mode is thing_ids
maxItems	integer	Maximum records to return (default: 50)
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy config — residential proxy strongly recommended for BGG

Example inputs

Hot list (top trending games):

{
  "mode": "hot",
  "maxItems": 50,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

Search by keyword:

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "Wingspan",
  "maxItems": 20,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

Specific games by ID:

{
  "mode": "thing_ids",
  "bggIds": [174430, 266192, 13, 161936],
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

Output format

Each record contains:

Field	Type	Description
bgg_id	integer	BoardGameGeek game ID
game_name	string	Primary English game name
alternate_names	string	All alternate/translated names (pipe-separated)
year_published	integer	Publication year
description	string	Short game description (HTML stripped)
image_url	string	High-resolution game image URL
thumbnail_url	string	Thumbnail image URL
min_players	integer	Minimum player count
max_players	integer	Maximum player count
playing_time_min	integer	Minimum play time in minutes
playing_time_max	integer	Maximum play time in minutes
min_age	integer	Minimum recommended age
categories	string	Game categories (pipe-separated, e.g. "Fantasy|Adventure")
mechanics	string	Game mechanics (pipe-separated, e.g. "Deck Building|Worker Placement")
families	string	Game families (pipe-separated)
designers	string	Game designers (pipe-separated)
artists	string	Illustrators/artists (pipe-separated)
publishers	string	Publishers (pipe-separated)
bgg_rank_overall	integer	BGG overall rank (populated in hot mode from hotness list)
expansion_of	string	BGG IDs of base games this expands (pipe-separated)
implements	string	BGG IDs of games this reimplements (pipe-separated)
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 scrape timestamp

Note: Rating and popularity statistics (average_rating, bayes_average_rating, num_owned, num_ratings, weight, etc.) require BGG's Application Token (their XML API v2 authentication system) and are returned as null. The game metadata above is fully available via the JSON API.

Example output

{
  "bgg_id": 266192,
  "game_name": "Wingspan",
  "alternate_names": "Flügelschlag|Крылья|Wingspan: Pájaros para Todos|展翅翱翔",
  "year_published": 2019,
  "description": "Attract a beautiful and diverse collection of birds to your wildlife preserve.",
  "image_url": "https://cf.geekdo-images.com/yLZJCVLlIx4c7eJEWUNJ7w__itemrep@2x/...",
  "thumbnail_url": "https://cf.geekdo-images.com/yLZJCVLlIx4c7eJEWUNJ7w__itemrep/...",
  "min_players": 1,
  "max_players": 5,
  "playing_time_min": 40,
  "playing_time_max": 70,
  "min_age": 10,
  "categories": "Animals|Card Game|Economic",
  "mechanics": "Card Drafting|Deck Building|Engine Building|Hand Management|Set Collection",
  "families": "Animals: Birds|Game: Wingspan Universe",
  "designers": "Elizabeth Hargrave",
  "artists": "Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo|Natalia Rojas|Beth Sobel",
  "publishers": "Stonemaier Games",
  "bgg_rank_overall": null,
  "expansion_of": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-26T14:30:00.000Z"
}

Use cases

• Board game retailers and cafes — research inventory, track trending titles, identify popular mechanics and themes
• Tabletop industry analysts — competitive intelligence for publishers (Asmodee, CMON, Z-Man, Stonemaier)
• Recommendation engines — seed a game recommendation dataset with categories, mechanics, and designer data
• Market researchers — track BGG hotness trends weekly; correlate with sales data
• Game designers — analyze mechanics and categories across top-ranked games
• List import tools — import your BGG collection or wishlist into spreadsheets or inventory systems

Technical notes

• Uses BGG's internal api.geekdo.com JSON API (not the XML API v2 which requires Application Token registration)
• DataImpulse residential proxy routes traffic to bypass BGG's datacenter IP blocks
• Rate-limited to approximately 1.4 requests/second to respect BGG's infrastructure
• search mode uses boardgamegeek.com/geeksearch.php which is behind Cloudflare — residential proxy quality affects success rate
• thing_ids and hot modes use api.geekdo.com which has no CF protection and is highly reliable