BoardGameGeek.jl

Utilities to scrape BoardGameGeek.com, the IMDB of board games.

Installation

To install this package, open the Julia package manager by typing ] in the REPL and run

pkg> add BoardGameGeek

BoardGameGeek.jl is compatible with all Julia versions ⩾ 1.6.

Getting started

Start by importing this package and DataFrames.jl:

using BoardGameGeek
using DataFrames

We can query the reviews a specific user wrote via userreviews(username)

julia> user = "bggjulia"

julia> DataFrame(userreviews(user))
4×5 DataFrame
 Row │ id      name                       username  rating   comment 
     │ Int64   String                     String    Float32  String  
─────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1 │ 140934  Arboretum                  bggjulia      9.0
   2 │ 225694  Decrypto                   bggjulia      8.5
   3 │    188  Go                         bggjulia     10.0
   4 │ 256960  Pax Pamir: Second Edition  bggjulia      9.0

or simply use collection get the game IDs of their collection

julia> collection(user)
4-element Vector{Int64}:
 140934
 225694
    188
 256960

Game reviews

Use gamereviews(id) to scrape all reviews that were written for a specific game

julia> DataFrame(gamereviews(188))
Scraping 15700 reviews for Go... 100%|█████████████████████| Time: 0:06:31
15700×5 DataFrame
   Row │ id     name    username          rating   comment                       ⋯
       │ Int64  String  String            Float32  String                        ⋯
───────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
     1 │   188  Go      xenocles             10.0  My all time favourite 'classi ⋯
     2 │   188  Go      guus                 10.0  The mother of all strategy ga
     3 │   188  Go      Varthlokkur          10.0
     4 │   188  Go      Hiroshi Ishikawa     10.0  Simple rule yet extremely dee
     5 │   188  Go      layotte              10.0                                ⋯
   ⋮   │   ⋮      ⋮            ⋮             ⋮                     ⋮             ⋱
 15696 │   188  Go      aircastle             1.0
 15697 │   188  Go      ashleybobal53         1.0
 15698 │   188  Go      danperrault           1.0
 15699 │   188  Go      vikings40             1.0                                ⋯
 15700 │   188  Go      akaiready             1.0
                                                   1 column and 15690 rows omitted

Note that this can take a while for games with many reviews, as we don't want to run into the BoardGameGeek API rate limit. The default wait time of 2 seconds per 100 reviews can be changed via the keyword argument waittime.

Full game info

Use gameinfo(id) to obtain all sorts of information about a game. A summary of all data is given in the reference below.

julia> DataFrame(gameinfo(collection(user)))
4×24 DataFrame
 Row │ id      name                       yearpublished  minplayers  maxplayers  ⋯
     │ Int64   String                     Int64          Int64       Int64       ⋯
─────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1 │ 140934  Arboretum                           2015           2           4  ⋯
   2 │ 225694  Decrypto                            2018           3           8
   3 │    188  Go                                 -2200           2           2
   4 │ 256960  Pax Pamir: Second Edition           2019           1           5
                                                                19 columns omitted

GeekBuddies

Finally, we can also take a look at "GeekBuddies" and user profiles via userinfo(name):

julia> buddies(user)
2-element Vector{String}:
 "Aldie"
 "dakarp"

julia> DataFrame(userinfo(buddies(user)))
2×5 DataFrame
 Row │ id     name    country        yearregistered  lastlogin  
     │ Int64  String  String         Int64           Date       
─────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1 │   688  Aldie   United States            1999  2022-02-13
   2 │   792  dakarp  United States            2002  2022-02-13

Reference

Exported functions

	Description
gamereviews(id)	return all ratings & reviews written about a game
gameinfo(id)	return basic information about a game
userreviews(name)	return all reviews written by a user
userinfo(name)	return basic user information
buddies(name)	return usernames of a user's friends
collection(name)	return game IDs of a user's collection

Data types

Fields of a BGGGameInfo object returned by gameinfo(id):

id                   :: Int64
name                 :: String
yearpublished        :: Int64
minplayers           :: Int64
maxplayers           :: Int64
playingtime          :: Int64
minplaytime          :: Int64
maxplaytime          :: Int64
minage               :: Int64
usersrated           :: Int64
average              :: Float32
bayesaverage         :: Float32
stddev               :: Float32
median               :: Float32
owned                :: Int64
trading              :: Int64
wanting              :: Int64
wishing              :: Int64
numcomments          :: Int64
numweights           :: Int64
averageweight        :: Float32
mechanics            :: Vector{String}
families             :: Vector{String}
suggested_numplayers :: Dict{String, Tuple{Int64, Int64, Int64}}