Games ~ BoardGameGeek (BGG) API - uchicago-cs/chigame GitHub Wiki

We plan to use the information from BGG to assist admins when they create games.

The official documentation: https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/BGG_XML_API2

A useful guide someone put together: http://www.tayloraliss.com/bggapi/

All calls use the following base url:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/xmlapi2/

Returns all games with <search_term> contained in their name, sorted alphabetically:

/search?type=boardgame&query=<search_term>

We can require that the result exactly match the search term:

/search?type=boardgame&exact=1&query=<search_term>

Get a list of the hottest boardgames on the site:

/hot?boardgame

Example response: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/xmlapi2/search?type=boardgame&query=catan

Returns the listing information for the game with id equal to <bgg_id>:

/thing?id=<bgg_id>

We can get extra information on ratings and other statistics by adding stats=1:

/thing?id=<bgg_id>&stats=1

Example response: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/xmlapi2/thing?id=13&stats=1

The BGG API returns XML, not JSON, so we need to handle responses slightly differently.

fetch(url)
    .then(response => response.text())
    .then(data => {
        let parser = new DOMParser();
        let xmlDoc = parser.parseFromString(data, "text/xml");

        let name = xmlDoc.querySelector('name').getAttribute('value');
        let image = xmlDoc.querySelector('image').textContent;
        let description = xmlDoc.querySelector('description').textContent;
    }).catch(error => {
        console.error('Error:', error);
    });

import requests
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

response = requests.get(url)
root = ET.fromstring(response.text)

name = root.find(".//name").get("value")
image = root.find(".//image").text
description = root.find(".//description").text