Release BoardGameHub 1.0.0 is out: the board game side of the hub

[Gwendal]

BoardGameHub is on the store. It is a separate add-on from GameHub rather than a mode of it: separate tables, routes, permissions, options, templates and navigation, so a board that covers video games and board games can run both sections properly instead of choosing between them.

What it does that a catalogue cannot

• The table. Say who turned up, how long you have and what you feel like. It reads the collections your members declared, along with weight, best player count, how recently each game hit the table and what this group thinks of it, then gives five suggestions and justifies every one in plain words: plays at four, 45 minutes against the 90 you have, the box is with Marc, nobody here has played it for six months. Freeze a shortlist behind a link and paste it into the thread for the evening.
• The box says, the table says. A game claims 120 minutes and your members logged 184. Both figures sit side by side on the game page, with the gap as a percentage and the number of plays it is measured over. At nine in the evening, nothing else on the page is as useful.
• A player count poll that means something. A game is rarely just two to five. Each count is marked Best, Works or Avoid by your members, and the page shows the verdict as a bar per count.
• The table sheet. Minimum age, illustrator, setup time, teaching time, footprint, language dependency, solo mode and three accessibility markers. A two hour game can then say plainly that 37 percent of the evening goes before the first turn.
• Before you play. Two columns on every game page: the rules almost every table gets wrong the first time, and the house rules yours settled on. Voted, sorted, folded away below a threshold rather than deleted.
• The shelf. A member's collection drawn as box spines, thickness proportional to weight, expansions filed against the game they belong to, and a dust index for the boxes that have not moved in six months.

Everything you would expect from a database is there as well: play journal, reviews scored on four criteria, half star ratings, collections and statuses, lists, planned sessions, game of the month, rankings, a release calendar, twenty achievements, player cards, tier lists, side by side comparison, a photo gallery, official rules as attachments, BBCode for inline game cards, a REST API, collaborative editing with history, full moderation and CSV import.

About the BoardGameGeek import
It needs an application token of your own. BoardGameGeek closed their XML API on 2 July 2025 and asks that every installation carry its own token rather than share one, so you register an application with them, wait for their approval, then paste the token into the options. Until you do, the import screen still takes a CSV file. The player count poll and the recorded playtime are never imported, deliberately: what makes them worth reading is that your own members answered them.

Good to know
XenForo 2.3 and PHP 8.0 or later, no dependency on another add-on, and nothing leaves your server unless you switch that import on. €40, one-time payment, 12 months of updates.

On the store · Its forum · The live demo

 

[Frode]

Thanks for making this a reality! Gwendal is awesome! I just knew I had to get this realized when I saw how awesome product GameHub was, I knew it was the right base for this product

 

[Gwendal]

The credit is yours, and I mean that literally rather than politely. This add-on exists because you looked at GameHub and said the base was right for board games, and then kept describing what a table actually needs until it stopped being an idea.

The parts that make it worth having are the ones that came out of those conversations: the recorded playtime standing next to the printed one, the player count marked Best, Works or Avoid instead of a range on a box, and the house rules column that only a community can fill. None of that can be scraped from a catalogue.

What it needs now is a first table. Put your collection in and log a few plays, and once there is enough for the numbers to mean something, I will read the first statistics it produces with you and we will see which of them deserve to stay.

 

[Frode]

Yeah now the work begins! I will start filling in details this week, and will share progress as it comes along to both use as base for the statistics and to showcase the addon for others to see

 

[Gwendal]

That is the right order: data first, opinions later.

When you have a few dozen games in and a handful of plays logged, say so here and I will come and read what the numbers actually say on your board. That first honest dataset is what decides which figures belong on a statistics page and which ones are decoration, and it is exactly the question I put to he-kr for GameHub. Two boards, two collections, one answer that is not a guess.

One thing worth doing early, while the catalogue is small: log the real playtime on the games you know well. The gap between the box and the table only becomes convincing once it is measured over several plays, and it is the figure people quote back at you.

 

[Gwendal]

Update: 1.0.1 is on the store

Same day, first correction, and it comes from Frode again: board game boxes are not all the same shape, and the database was assuming they were. It cropped everything to a tall 3:4, which is fine for a video game cover and wrong for half a board game shelf.

Box shape is now a setting, with three choices:

• Tall 3:4, cropped to fill (the default, and what the screenshots on the store show).
• Square 1:1, cropped to fill.
• Square, whole box shown, nothing cropped. This is the one for a shelf that mixes square and rectangular boxes: every cover is displayed whole whatever shape the file is, so a square box never loses its title to a crop and a rectangular one is never stretched.

It applies everywhere a cover appears: the browse grid, the featured panel, the game page header and the profile tab. Default left on the original behaviour so an existing install does not change look on its own.

Admin CP, Add-ons, Install/upgrade from archive.