Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / 7 Things I Like About Boardgamegeek
Transcript
- Pick Up & Deliver 821: 7 Things I like About Boardgamegeek April 20, 2026 Transcript Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. [opening music] Well, greetings, listeners. It's a warm day here in suburban Chicago. We went from the weather is just chilly enough that I have to consider wearing hat and gloves. Two weekends ago to now, it's hot enough that I kind of wish I brought shorts with me to walk home in. Man, what a swing. Does make it hard to find the balance, but, uh. Such is the end of April in my experience, and I'm happy to be talking to you about board games. So today I was looking through old episodes and trying to figure out if I've ever done this before, and I don't think that I have. So today I thought I would talk about five things I like about boardgamegeek. I was thinking about this because I teach a class called Board Games and Community, where we talk about how board games work. We explore different mechanisms. The students design board games over the course of the semester. But one of the framing questions we have is how do board games function as a social object? How do board games create connections between people and interesting. I think in an interesting kind of yin yang thing, they also depend on connections between people. Like there are board games that you can play by yourself generally. And here I'm using board games broadly to mean games you play on the table. The class is actually called tabletop games, but a key element of it is this object that creates a social experience among the people who are participating. It provides a social lubricant. It gives people a method by which they can interact with one another, even if they don't have a means to interact Otherwise it helps build those connections. So once you've done this with somebody, then after that you have connection with them. And so as part of that class, I think about what are the different board game communities I participate in? Of course, I have the two board game clubs that I run. There's toggle gaming, which meets every Wednesday night in Arlington Heights. If you're in the Chicago area, come join us. You can find us at togglegaming.com. And of course, then there is the College Board Game Club, which I've mentioned a few times. I'm the faculty advisor for, so I don't actually run it, but I kind of run it and I go to that every other week. For the most part, I'm skipping this week because I have some family stuff to do, but for the most part, I go nearly every week or every other week. So that gets me, gives me a baseline about different board game communities I'm in. Of course, I also play games with a couple different couple friends. I play games with some some of my friends. I play games with my family. So I have a bunch of different board game communities I participate in. But one of the most consistent is a virtual community I participate in is the community of boardgamegeek. Boardgamegeek is a website, of course, that was created in something like two thousand and four, and it is a website about board games. Its design has a sort of old school look to it, although they've been modernizing. I think it looks a little flashier now than it used to, but it is at its heart, the core thing that it does to create this community is it has a very robust database of information about board games. Of the many places you might find to learn about board games, very few of them have as much information as Boardgamegeek does. They have a a community sourced system for submitting new games. If you encounter a game that's not in the boardgamegeek Geek database, they will accept it. They have a forum system for pretty much every object. Every page in the database has a commenting feature where you can post a comment on it. They have a variety of different ways that users can create community elements. I mean, it is essentially at its core, a web 2.0-style website created in the early days of web 2.0. For those of you too young, 2.0 was the way of describing the early emergence of the internet, where the users make the content. Before that, web pages were made by individuals or groups, and when you visited them, it was like reading a book. You don't actually add to it. Whereas I mean, there were plenty of social spaces before that, web bulletin boards and whatnot. But there became a moment where the ability of individuals to contribute to creating content on the internet became sort of universal. [time shift sound effect.] All right. I'm continuing the episode the next day. I had to stop. I actually ran into my son walking home from school, so I chatted with him instead of doing the podcast. I know, committed to more committed to parenting than podcasting. My apologies. So I'm considering I'm continuing last day�s pod. [time shift sound effect] So I wanted to talk about seven things that I really like about boardgamegeek. Uh, the first one is ongoing activities or games. There are a couple of different things that I do on boardgamegeek that are sort of ways to enjoy the hobby and ways to engage with that community that occur on an ongoing basis. Probably my favorite of these is the forum called Name That Game, and it's g a a a a y m e it is a forum started by some of the board gamers, and it is just a game where people post pictures from of game components. And the rule is the game has to be from the top three thousand games in the database. So you can't post anything incredibly obscure. Although there are plenty of obscure things in the top three thousand games. And then other. And then you post a clue. So you post a picture of the component and then a little clue. And then people try to guess what game that's from, and the person who guesses correctly then gets to post the next clue. I've been participating in this forum for a couple years now. It's really fun. It's a nice little check in. There's usually a new puzzle every day or two. It's very rarely faster than that, although it's not uncommon for somebody to post something and then have it be solved within an hour. And then it takes like a day before that person checks back, finds out it was solved, and comes up with a new and then says correct, and then it's passed on to the next person. So you should. I will post a link to that in the show notes. It's a really fun community. It doesn't really they don't really spend much time on the LGBTQ part. I guess just it is an LGBTQ friendly space, as is, frankly, most of boardgamegeek, although I guess it's more overtly friendly rather than passively friendly. That is my my favorite first thing. Oh, the other a couple other ongoing things I do. I participate in the out of the Dust forum, which is a week, a monthly forum where people post the games that they haven't played or the games that they played in the last month that they hadn't played in the last year. So I like posting there. And then of course, I keep my own ongoing and ever expanding record of games I've played in my top of the stack geek lists, which are linked from my personal account. They are public, but I don't do anything to advertise them. So that is my. The ongoing games and activities that I enjoy on boardgamegeek. Second thing, and this maybe is my favorite thing about the site is its tendency to have specific, hard to solve rules. Questions answered. Now, I love that boardgamegeek often has the answer to the question you're looking for about a game, especially if the game's not brand new. If it's brand new, sometimes there's not a lot of talk about it yet, but if it's like a year old, then often there is somebody asking the question that you have and someone else answering it in quick succession. So a lot of times you can just type boardgamegeek in Google, you can go into Google type boardgamegeek space, and then whatever your question is. I mean, if it's something really simple, there's often, often the rule is there, but I really enjoy the more complex things. For example, there was a long discussion on the board game sanctuary or the forum about the board game sanctuary, about weather, about when you get the instant bonus for putting down a tile. It becomes particularly relevant if you're putting down a tile that that requires open spaces next to it. The question was, if you put down a tile that requires open spaces next to it and you put down your first open space tile. And in doing so, you cover up one of the bonus spots that lets you draw a tile from the stack. Do you get to draw that tile from the stack before you put down the second open space tile? And we went back and forth. There was a long discussion about both options seemed reasonably interpreted from the rules. I think I came down on the on the idea that, no, you can't, but it was a close run thing. And then I actually emailed the publisher and said, hey, we, we could really use an official ruling on this because the rules aren't clear. And they did come in and they ruled on my side. Ha ha. Uh, they also said you were right to ask for a ruling, which I think is a weird a weird thing to say. I guess they acknowledged that their rules weren't entirely clear on that point. Maybe that's what they meant. But. But I love those conversations. A little advice if you ever participate in one of those, especially if you're the first respondent or no one has done it yet, when you reply, use the quote function to capture the entire post of the original poster. Because sometimes, especially people who aren't really familiar with Boardgamegeek. Once their question is answered, they'll try to delete the thread so that. I guess, especially if they thought it was a. The answer was very obvious and they feel dumb having asked the question. But then when they try to delete the thread, all that happens is the initial post gets deleted, the rest of the thread is there and now we can't see the question that was asked. It's really annoying. So if you are answering questions on boardgamegeek, I encourage you to capture the question as part of your answer. My third favorite thing about BoardGameGeek is the fan made content. There's a ton of fan made content on boardgamegeek things like player aids, thing like extra scenarios or solo modes. I love that people put this energy into it. I myself have participated in a variety of ways. Perhaps my favorite thing was there was a game that came out on Kickstarter a while back called Loop Inc, and it came with a solo mode, but the instructions for the solo mode were literally literally just a downloadable PDF that was a export of a Microsoft Word document. It was just typed on paper and I found it really annoying. I didn't think it looked good, and I'd been experimenting with various graphic design softwares. So I was like, oh, this would be an interesting project. So I took art assets from the box and the rule book, tweaked them a little bit, added my own graphic design flair to try to get it as close to looking like the text of the rule book as I could. And then I got permission from the publisher, because Boardgamegeek has a copyright rule that you can't publish stuff without permission from the publisher. And then, I mean, if you're using their assets. And then I posted it and it basically looked, I think it looks like it was graphic designed by the people who made the game and it fits the aesthetic. And my favorite thing, a couple people said, great, thanks. The publisher said, great, thanks. And I and uh, asked, I asked if I could put a credit for myself on there as well, and they said, yes, please do. But my favorite thing was one person said, this is what I was expecting when they said we'd get a solo mode. I was like, yes! Haha. But anyway, I really like the fan made content. There's a lot of good stuff on boardgamegeek, a lot of ways that people participate in the community by adding to the value of the game. Number four is the recommendation forum. There's an excellent forum on boardgamegeek called recommendations, where people will post a question asking for a specific type of game, and then people will post replies with a bunch of other suggestions. It's great. Sometimes people don't read the question very carefully, which is frustrating. So like you say, I'm looking for a co-op game that I can play that's really good two player and doesn't involve killing anything and people replying like, oh, I really like this two player game where you're slaughtering orcs or I really like this game that's best at three and you sort of like, well, you didn't hear all the things I asked for. But that said, they often do and you can ignore the ones who didn't. The recommendation forum is a great way to find out about new games, or to find games that do a thing, or get some ideas for games that you maybe weren't aware of. I mean, there are something like two or three thousand games a year coming out. It's really hard to keep track of them all. And so having that recommendation forum is a good way to find out what what have you been missing? Number five should be the most obvious. It's the database itself. Boardgamegeek is a wonderful resource for everything about board games. I can't I literally can't overestimate how often I use it. I use it all the time. Whenever I'm doing board game stuff. It's just really handy to have all that information there, and they do a great job curating it. So not a lot to say there, but I really like the way the boardgamegeek handles how they handle data. Next up is moderation. Now this one is a little scandalous, perhaps. Boardgamegeek did have for a long time a kind of moderation problem. There were a fair number of trolls and the site was pretty unfriendly for new people. It is still a little bewildering. There's a lot of content there, and you have to kind of learn how it works. I think that's true of any complicated place, but it also was pretty unfriendly. There were a lot of people who would just say things that were rude. When people tried to start conversations about interesting, complicated topics. Sometimes people get really dismissive really quick, or be antagonistic or whatever. So there was a problem of people sort of rudely gatekeeping or acting not right on the forums. And that's disappointing because I want I want my board game community to be welcoming and a lot of people do as well. Fortunately, one of the people who does is Aldie and it's his site, so he guided his community and his forum moderators to really make an effort to diminish that kind of negative behavior. They left one little zone that's open for trolls called RSP religion, sex politics. That is a free for all zone where you're pretty much allowed to say anything. I don't know if they would tolerate openly pro-Nazi propaganda or something like that, but people are generally a lot more willing to get into flame wars and speak their speak their unvarnished mind there, and you won't get in trouble for doing so. I don't like to participate in those spaces, but the rest of BoardGameGeek, I think, does a pretty good job of handling complicated topics, even though often people will get blocked for saying things. Sometimes they're a little heavy handed with that, but I'd rather they be heavy handed than light handed. And finally, one of my favorite things about the boardgamegeek community is this Citizen Star program. This was started, I think, by user Dave Wave motion. And what it is, is a special badge that a player that is a person on board can be can get for from another person. If your on boardgamegeek. You can give once a month. You can give someone a citizen star just by sending a geek message to wave motion as the username and saying, I would like to give this person a star. The only rules are they can't have the maximum number of stars, which is six already, so they have to be eligible to get a star. They shouldn't be one of the few people who've said, I don't want stars, please. There are a few, not very many, and it can't be someone you've given a star to before. You're also not allowed to collude with other people or discuss giving stars to other people. You're not allowed to do like star for star or any nonsense like that. So don't do that. Just if you see someone doing a cool thing on board game. I keep a little list for myself. If I see someone doing a cool thing on boardgamegeek, I'll note them down. And then when I. Each month when I go to give a star, I give it to one of the people I've noted down. I always have more people on my list than I have opportunities to give stars. So it's really fun. Cost you. Nothing makes somebody else feel good. You should do it. The Citizen Stars program. I will put a link to that in my show notes as well. So if you are not on boardgamegeek, you should be on boardgamegeek. Go over to boardgamegeek dot com and sign up for an account. It's free and you can start participating today. They do a fundraiser each year where they ask for support. If you fund, if you give them money, you'll get a little badge. Here's an insider tip. You get the badge whenever you give them the money. I used to think that you had to give them the money during the fundraising campaign in December, but what would happen is you give them the money in like December of 2025, and then you have the 2025 support badge, and it's still there in 2026, but like 2026 starts the next year, but the support system is always open. It's only during the last month of the year that they do the campaign. So what I started doing is I stopped donating money during the campaign and I started donating money in January instead. And having donated money in January, I get the badge for the whole year. It's a system that works well and I encourage you to try it if you find the site valuable. Well, that's about it for me today. I want to say thank you for joining me on my walk, and I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [closing music] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.