BoardGameGeek (BGG) is an online forum for
board gaming hobbyists and a game database that holds reviews, images and videos for over 125,600 different
tabletop game
Tabletop games or tabletops are games that are normally played on a table or other flat surface, such as board games, card games, dice games, miniature wargames, or tile-based games.
Classification according to equipment used
Tabletop ga ...
s, including
European-style board games,
wargames, and
card game
A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific.
Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). A small number of card ga ...
s.
In addition to the game database, the site allows users to rate games on a 1–10 scale and publishes a ranked list of board games.
As of , boardgamegeek.com has an
Alexa rank
Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.
Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock. ...
of
.
History
BoardGameGeek was founded in January 2000 by Scott Alden and Derk Solko,
and marked its 20th anniversary on 20 January 2020.
Since 2005, BoardGameGeek hosts an annual board game convention, BGG.CON, that has a focus on playing games, and where winners of the Golden Geek Awards are announced. New games are showcased and convention staff is provided to teach rules. There is also an annual Spring BGG.CON which is family friendly, and an annual BGG@Sea which is held on a cruise.
In 2010, BoardGameGeek received the
Diana Jones Award, which recognized it as "a resource without peer for board and card gamers, the recognized authority of this online community." The ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' has called BoardGameGeek "the hub of board gaming on the internet."
In 2020, ''BoardGameGeek'' was inducted into the
Origins Award
The Origins Awards are American awards for outstanding work in the game industry. They are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design at the Origins Game Fair on an annual basis for the previous year, so (for example) the 1979 a ...
Hall of Fame.
The site has branched out into other fields by using the same system for RPGs and video games (rpggeek.com and videogamegeek.com).
Golden Geek Award
Since 2006, the site annually awards the best new board games of the year with the Golden Geek Award. Winners are selected based on a vote by registered users.
2006 - 2009
2010 - 2019
;RPG and Video Game awards
RPG and Video game awards were introduced in 2014 and awarded through 2017. Only 1 category was awarded in 2018, and none in following years.
2020 - Present
2020 saw many awards replaced with new categories, such as "Board Game of the Year" replaced with "Game of the Year, Light", "Medium" and "Heavy".
See also
*''
Going Cardboard
''Going Cardboard: A Board Game Documentary'' is a 2012 documentary about the American adoption of German-style board games, and includes coverage of the 2009 board game event ''Spiel'' in Essen, Germany, as well as interviews with many prominent ...
'' (documentary)
References
External links
* {{Official website
Board game websites
Online game databases
American review websites
Internet properties established in 2000