I’d like to wish a very Happy Birthday to my most favorite website of all – Board Game Geek! (I’ll be referring to Board Game Geek as BGG for short.) It is their 22nd birthday!
Today the owner Scott Alden posted to the forums that January 2000 was the month BGG started as a website. The past year, BGG has had 46 million unique visitors and over a billion page views!
BGG is the ultimate website for anything board games. It has the most complete database of board games, forums to talk about board games, user-submitted photos, player Guilds to chat about board game niches, marketplace to buy/sell games, GeekLists, and more! In addition to tracking all board games in a ranked list, on their front page, it tracks the top 50 trending games in their Hotness section, a handy Crowdfunding Countdown, news/videos/reviews and Giveaway Contests. Excuse me as I take a moment to check out this new Libertalia game from Stonemaier Games…
Catan – one of the first games on Board Game Geek
Out of curiosity, I checked to see their very first board games they added to their site. I just switched their URL to this: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1/ and the game Die Macher (1986) showed up, it still has an overall rank of 325 game of all time and a rating of 7.6. A surprising number of those first games are still in the top hundreds, but of course some fell into obscurity with a ranking in the thousands today.
The first game I know and own was their 13th game added – Catan (1995) with an overall rank today of 434 and rating of 7.1. Here is what that page looked like in the early days of BGG:
Here’s what that same page looks like today, same id number and all:
BGG and me
I don’t know what year I discovered BGG, but I lurked long before I joined BGG in the year 2016. Although I was busy with video games and other hobbies at the time, I started reading the forums and GeekLists more and more. I played some games with friends and family. As I learned it wasn’t so easy to get people together, I stumbled upon the 1 Player Guild on BGG a few years back. October became my favorite month on the website as people listed their top 20 Solo Games. So many tempting GeekLists flooded the pages! In November, every day those Top 200 Solo Games of 20xx would be revealed in chunks of 10. I think these solo GeekLists had the most impact on my wallet. I slowly started building my game collection, gathering momentum in the year 2020.
Other than the compilation of the Top 200 Solo games of the year, my other favorite places to lurk are the Solitaire Games on Your Table of the month. Last year I poked out of lurkdom and posted to this list sometimes. I hope to contribute more in the future!
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