Board Game Geek

About Board Game Geek

The BGG XML API2 is a public XML-based web API for BoardGameGeek, providing programmatic access to the site's database of board games, expansions, accessories, video games, RPG items, and periodicals ("things"), as well as related "families" (RPG, RPG periodical, and board game family groupings). Requests are made against a root path at boardgamegeek.com/xmlapi2/ using query parameters, and the server enforces rate limiting, returning 500 or 503 responses if requests are sent too frequently (a 5-second wait between requests is noted as generally sufficient).

Beyond core item data, the API exposes endpoints for forums and forum threads, user profiles (including buddies, guilds, hot lists, and top lists), guild information and member rosters, and play logs. Item queries support optional parameters for version info, videos, ranking and rating statistics, marketplace data, and comments or ratings, with paging controls for larger result sets. A separate CSV download is also provided containing game names, ids, ranks, and average ratings for the full database.

This is intended for developers building tools or integrations that need structured access to BoardGameGeek's game catalog, user, forum, or community data, such as applications for tracking collections, analyzing ratings, or mining game and forum data.

Key features

• XML API for querying board game, expansion, accessory, videogame, and RPG data (things)
• Retrieve family, forum, thread, user, guild, and play data via dedicated endpoints
• Bulk CSV download of game names, ids, ranks, and average ratings
• Ratings, comments, and ranking stats for items via the thing endpoint
• Paginated results for comments, ratings, buddies, guilds, and forum threads

Frequently asked questions