🎲 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.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-21 · 📊 17 fields per record · 50,000+ games · Global coverage

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.

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👥 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

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📋 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.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon

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⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Max number of games to return. Free: 10, Paid: up to 1,000,000
mode	select	hot	Discovery mode: hot, search, or top-ranked
search	string	strategy	Search query (used only in search mode)

Example - Hot Games (default):

{
  "maxItems": 50,
  "mode": "hot"
}

Example - Search Mode:

{
  "maxItems": 20,
  "mode": "search",
  "search": "dungeon crawler"
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Free users are automatically limited to 10 items per run regardless of maxItems. Upgrade to a paid plan to unlock up to 1,000,000 items. The search field is only used when mode is set to search.

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📊 Output

Each item in the dataset represents one board game. All fields are always present (never missing a column).

Field	Type	Description
🖼️ imageUrl	string	Cover image URL
🎲 name	string	Primary name of the game
📅 yearPublished	integer	Year of publication
🏆 rank	integer	BGG rank (available in hot and top-ranked modes)
👥 minPlayers	integer	Minimum number of players
👥 maxPlayers	integer	Maximum number of players
⏱️ minPlaytime	integer	Minimum playtime in minutes
⏱️ maxPlaytime	integer	Maximum playtime in minutes
🎂 minAge	integer	Minimum recommended age
📝 description	string	Full game description (HTML stripped)
🏷️ categories	array	BGG categories (e.g. ["Adventure", "Fantasy"])
⚙️ mechanics	array	Game mechanics (e.g. ["Cooperative", "Deck Building"])
✏️ designers	array	Game designers
🏢 publishers	array	Publishers worldwide
🔗 url	string	BGG page URL
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of collection
❌ error	string	Error message (null on success)

Sample records from a real run:

[
  {
    "imageUrl": "https://cf.geekdo-images.com/XQI7yrtamaXN2qHJBD_JKg__square100/img/zMdD7h62CTYY9CB574Skz911tys=/0x211:712x923/100x100/filters:strip_icc()/pic9349843.png",
    "name": "First Giants",
    "yearPublished": 2026,
    "rank": 10635,
    "minPlayers": 2,
    "maxPlayers": 5,
    "minPlaytime": 30,
    "maxPlaytime": 30,
    "minAge": 10,
    "description": "Dive into First Giants, a race to create the most prestigious prehistorical animal exhibit! Build your engine by collecting cards with powerful effects OR score points by playing your cards in the exhibit area...",
    "categories": ["Card Game"],
    "mechanics": ["Open Drafting", "Set Collection"],
    "designers": ["Matthew Dunstan", "Brett J. Gilbert"],
    "publishers": ["Space Cowboys", "Hobby Japan", "Rebel Sp. z o.o."],
    "url": "https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/462464",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-21T23:52:49.634Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "imageUrl": "https://cf.geekdo-images.com/jcaf3UgefVKOrIXt3ijpGA__square100/img/P0spkO6WvWuYRocn5w5MGQG5nho=/100x100/filters:strip_icc()/pic9477824.jpg",
    "name": "Morty Sorty Magic Shop",
    "yearPublished": 2026,
    "rank": 13518,
    "minPlayers": 2,
    "maxPlayers": 4,
    "minPlaytime": 30,
    "maxPlaytime": 30,
    "minAge": 8,
    "description": "The 2 to 4 aspiring sorting masters must skillfully arrange the ingredient jars on the shelves. Competing for the owner's favor, the young magical talents gradually fill their own shelf board...",
    "categories": [],
    "mechanics": ["Tile Placement"],
    "designers": ["Markus Slawitscheck"],
    "publishers": ["Schmidt Spiele"],
    "url": "https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/462742",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-21T23:52:50.196Z",
    "error": null
  }
]

---

✨ Why choose this Actor

Feature	Benefit
🌐 BGG's own internal API	Data direct from boardgamegeek.com's live database
🎲 3 discovery modes	Hot, search, and top-ranked - cover any use case
📊 17 fields per record	Categories, mechanics, designers, publishers, and more
⚡ Fast API-first approach	No browser required - pure fetch, runs in seconds
🔓 No auth required	Fully public data - no API keys or login needed
🧩 Rich metadata	Full category and mechanic taxonomy from BGG's database
💾 4 export formats	CSV, Excel, JSON, XML all available from the dataset
🌍 Global coverage	Games from every country, publisher, and era

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Method	Speed	Scale	Automation	Cost
This Actor	Seconds	1M+ records	Full	Free tier available
Manual BGG browsing	Minutes per page	Very limited	None	Free but slow
BGG XML API (auth required)	Fast	Unlimited	Possible	Requires BGG account
Custom scraper	Moderate	Varies	Possible	Dev time required

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🚀 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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💼 Business use cases

🛒 Retail Inventory Planning

Pull the current hot games list weekly to identify trending titles before they sell out. Cross-reference BGG rank with your store inventory to reorder popular games automatically. Combine with your POS data to correlate BGG trends with actual sales velocity.

📱 App and Platform Development

Seed a board game recommendation engine or companion app with structured game data. Use categories and mechanics as taxonomy for user preference matching. Keep your database fresh by running the actor on a schedule to catch new releases.

📰 Content and Journalism

Export the top-ranked games of all time with designers and publishers for a "history of board gaming" article. Search for games by mechanic (e.g. "deck building") to write a genre deep-dive. Pull yearly data to analyze which mechanics dominated each era.

🏭 Publisher and Designer Research

Analyze which mechanics appear most in top-ranked games. Track which publishers have the most games in the top 100. Use search mode to monitor how games with your target mechanics are performing on BGG.

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🔌 Automating BoardGameGeek Scraper

Connect this actor to your existing workflows using Make, Zapier, or direct API:

• Make (Integromat): Trigger a weekly run and post new hot games to a Slack channel or Google Sheet
• Zapier: When the dataset updates, push new game records to an Airtable base or Notion database
• Apify API: Call POST /v2/acts/parseforge~boardgamegeek-scraper/runs with your input JSON
• Webhooks: Configure Apify webhooks to notify your endpoint when the dataset is ready
• GitHub Actions: Add a scheduled workflow to refresh your game catalog database weekly

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

🎓 Academic Research

Study the evolution of board game mechanics over decades. Analyze which categories dominated different eras. Research the correlation between game complexity (player count, playtime) and BGG rank. Hundreds of papers cite BGG data - now you can replicate or extend their datasets programmatically.

🧑‍💻 Developer Experiments

Build a "what should I play tonight?" app, create a board game similarity engine, or train a recommendation model using categories and mechanics as features. The structured output is ready for pandas, scikit-learn, or any ML pipeline.

🤲 Community and Non-Profit Work

Help libraries, schools, or game lending libraries catalog their collections. Export data for a local game club's inventory system. Build a public tool that helps educators find age-appropriate games by mechanic and player count.

🧪 Data Science Education

Board game data is a perfect teaching dataset - it's intuitive, multi-dimensional, and interesting. Use it to teach pandas filtering, categorical data analysis, recommendation systems, or data visualization in a context students actually care about.

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

You can ask an AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to help you use this actor. Try prompts like:

• "What mode should I use in the BoardGameGeek Scraper to find cooperative games?"
• "Write me a Python script to call the Apify API and run ParseForge/boardgamegeek-scraper with search mode"
• "How do I filter the BoardGameGeek output to only show games for 2-4 players?"
• "What's the best way to build a board game recommendation engine from this data?"

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🤔 Do I need a BGG account or API key to use this? No. This actor uses BGG's public data endpoints with no authentication. You only need an Apify account to run the actor.

🎲 What modes are available? Three modes: hot returns the 50 currently trending games on BGG; search finds games by keyword; top-ranked returns BGG's highest-ranked games of all time.

📊 How many games are available? BGG has over 140,000 board games in its database. The hot list returns 50 games, search returns up to hundreds per query, and top-ranked covers the best games in the database.

🔄 How often does the hot list update? BGG's hot games list updates in near-real-time based on user activity, views, and interactions. Running the actor daily captures fresh trending data.

📅 Which fields are always populated? name, url, and scrapedAt are always present. All other fields may be null if BGG doesn't have that data for a specific game (e.g. old games may lack player count data).

⚡ How fast is a typical run? For 10 games (free tier), expect under 5 seconds. For 50 hot games, under 20 seconds. Each game requires one API call with a 300ms delay to respect BGG's rate limits.

🔢 What is the rank field? For hot mode, rank reflects the game's current BGG geek rank (overall board game ranking). For top-ranked mode, rank reflects the position in our curated top list. For search mode, rank is null.

💰 How much does it cost to run? Free users get 10 items per run as a preview. Paid users get up to 1,000,000 items. Create a free account with $5 credit to get started.

📋 What export formats are available? Your dataset is available as JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), and XML directly from the Apify console.

🔗 Can I run this on a schedule? Yes. Use Apify's built-in scheduling to run the actor daily or weekly to track how the hot games list changes over time.

🏷️ What are categories and mechanics? Categories describe what a game is about (e.g. "Fantasy", "Science Fiction", "Card Game"). Mechanics describe how the game is played (e.g. "Deck Building", "Worker Placement", "Cooperative Game"). BGG maintains the authoritative taxonomy for both.

🖼️ Are images included? Yes. The imageUrl field returns a 100x100 thumbnail image URL hosted on BGG's CDN (geekdo-images.com). Full-resolution images are available by modifying the URL parameters.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

Connect your BoardGameGeek dataset to:

Spreadsheets: Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, BigQuery BI Tools: Tableau, Power BI, Metabase, Looker Automation: Make (Integromat), Zapier, n8n, Pipedream Data Science: Python (pandas, numpy), R, Jupyter Notebooks Storage: AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob APIs: REST endpoints, GraphQL, webhooks Messaging: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord

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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.