🎲 BoardGameGeek Scraper

🚀 Export board game data from BoardGameGeek in seconds. Hot games, search results, and top-ranked titles with categories, mechanics, designers, publishers, and more - ready for CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML download.

BoardGameGeek (BGG) is the world's largest and most authoritative board game database, with over 140,000 titles rated and reviewed by millions of enthusiasts. This actor fetches real-time data directly from BGG's internal API - no authentication required, no scraping brittle HTML, just clean structured records ready for analysis.

Each record represents one board game: its name, year published, current BGG rank, player count, playtime, age recommendation, description, and rich metadata including categories, mechanics, designers, and publishers. Data is sourced from the same API powering boardgamegeek.com itself.

This actor gives you programmatic access to the board game data that powers the world's largest gaming community - delivered to your Apify dataset in seconds.

👥 Target Audience / Use Cases

Who	What they do with it
Board game retailers	Track trending games and stock popular titles
Game designers	Research mechanics and categories in the market
Data scientists	Build recommendation engines and trend models
Collectors and enthusiasts	Export wishlists and catalog personal collections
Journalists and bloggers	Pull data for "top games of the year" roundups
Publishers and distributors	Monitor competitor titles and emerging mechanics
App developers	Seed databases for board game companion apps
Academic researchers	Study game design trends and player preference patterns

📋 What the BoardGameGeek Scraper does

• Fetches hot games currently trending on BGG (50 most trending titles)
• Supports search mode - find games by keyword (e.g. "catan", "dungeon", "strategy")
• Includes top-ranked mode - export BGG's top-ranked board games of all time
• Returns detailed metadata: categories, mechanics, designers, and publishers per game
• Includes player count, playtime, age recommendation, and full description
• Outputs clean structured records with imageUrl, name, rank, url, and more
• Automatically limits free users to 10 items as a preview; paid users get up to 1,000,000
• Works entirely on BGG's public API - no authentication required

💡 Why it matters: BoardGameGeek is the Wikipedia of board games. Getting this data programmatically - rather than clicking through BGG's interface - saves hours of manual data entry and enables automation, trend monitoring, and large-scale game catalog analysis.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: categories, description, designers, imageUrl, maxPlayers, maxPlaytime, mechanics, minAge, minPlayers, minPlaytime, name, publishers, rank, results, scrapedAt, url, yearPublished. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account (includes $5 free credit)
2. Find the BoardGameGeek Scraper in the Apify Store
3. Choose your mode: hot for trending games, search for keyword lookup, top-ranked for BGG's best
4. Set maxItems to control how many games to return
5. Click Start and wait seconds for the run to complete
6. Download your dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more high-quality public data actors.

Disclaimer: This actor uses BoardGameGeek's public data endpoints at boardgamegeek.com and api.geekdo.com. All data is sourced directly from BGG's live database and is subject to BoardGameGeek's Terms of Use. ParseForge is not affiliated with BoardGameGeek LLC. Please use this actor responsibly and in accordance with BGG's terms of service.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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