Board Game Search

Track and manage your board game collection directly within Obsidian.

Features

🎲 Board Game Integration

• Search and import board games from BoardGameGeek (BGG)
• Automatically create game entries with detailed metadata
• Download and save game cover images

Image download quality

Images are downloaded and stored in different resolutions to optimize for various use cases. Here is an example comparison of the different image sizes and their characteristics:

Version	Dimensions	File Size	Percentage
Thumbnail	95 x 150	3.4 KB	11%
Medium	244 x 385	14.1 KB	47%
Full	488 x 771	29.9 KB	100%

📊 Session Tracking

Work in progress - Record individual game play sessions - Track players, winners, play time, and notes - Append session details to game entries

🛠️ Customizable Settings

• Configure file location for game entries
• Customize file name format
• Control image saving preferences - Toggle session tracking features

Installation

From Obsidian Plugin Store

1. Open Obsidian
2. Go to Settings → Community plugins
3. Enable Community Plugins
4. Click "Browse" and search for "Boardgame Search"
5. Click "Install" and then "Enable"

Manual Installation

1. Download the latest release from GitHub
2. Create a folder your-vault/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-boardgame-plugin
3. Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into the folder or just extract and move the zip
4. Enable the plugin in Obsidian

Usage

Searching for Games

• Click the dice icon in the ribbon
• Type the game name in the search bar
• Browse and select a game
• Choose to create a game entry or start a game session or use the command Search BoardGameGeek

Creating Game Entries

• Game entries include:
  • Game title
  • BGG ID
  • Player count
  • Play time
  • Year published
  • Rating
  • Optional thumbnail image

Example Workflow

1. Click "Search BoardGameGeek"
2. Search "Catan"
3. Select the game
4. Plugin creates a detailed game entry

📈 Statistics and Visualization

• Support for Obsidian Charts plugin
• Visualize player count data
• Age recommendation statistics
• Language dependency information

Templating

The plugin uses Nunjucks templating for customizable game entries. Access available template data using the Data Explorer command in Obsidian.

Available Template Variables

game:
  name: string
  id: string
  minPlayers: number
  maxPlayers: number
  playTime: number
  yearPublished: string
  rating: number
  image: string
  description: string
  suggestedPlayerCount:
    best: string
    recommended: string
  playerCountPoll: Array
  playerAgePoll: object
  languageDependencePoll: object

useCharts: boolean
chartWidth: string
useLocalImages: boolean
date: Date

Example Template

## {{game.name}}

### Overview
{% if game.image %}
{% if useLocalImages %}
![[{{ game.image }}]]
{% else %}
![{{ game.name }}]({{ game.image }})
{% endif %}
{% endif %}

### Game Details
- **Min Players:** {{ game.minPlayers | default('Unknown') }}
- **Max Players:** {{ game.maxPlayers | default('Unknown') }}
- **Play Time:** {{ game.playingTime | default('Unknown') }}{% if game.playingTime %} minutes{% endif %}
- **Year Published:** {{ game.yearPublished | default('Unknown') }}
- **BGG Rating:** {{ game.rating | number(1) | default('N/A') }}{% if game.rating %}/10{% endif %}

### Notes
{% persist "notes" %}
Add your personal notes here - this section won't be overwritten on reimport
{% endpersist %}

Persistent Sections

Use the persist tag to create sections that won't be overwritten on reimport:

{% persist "section-name" %}
Your persistent content here
{% endpersist %}

Charts Support

If you have the Obsidian Charts plugin installed, enable chart support in settings to visualize data:

{% if useCharts %}
^playerCountData

\`\`\`chart
type: bar
id: playerCountData
layout: rows
width: {{ chartWidth }}
legend: true
title: Player Count Votes
beginAtZero: true
\`\`\`
{% endif %}

Example Overview

Here is an example for a collection, which uses:

• Dataview
• Meta Bind
• Minimal Theme

Code:

---
notetype: database
cssclasses:
  - cards
  - cards-2-3
  - cards-cover
  - table-max
  - table-nowrap
---

```meta-bind-button
label: New Game
icon: ""
hidden: false
class: ""
tooltip: ""
id: ""
style: default
actions:
  - type: command
    command: boardgame-search:search-bgg

```

```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID
	embed(link(meta(link(image)).path)) as "",
	link(file.link, title) as Title,
	ownership,
	choice(played, "✅", " - ") as Played
FROM #boardgame 
WHERE !contains(file.path, "templates")
SORT title ASC
```

Support

If you find this plugin useful, please consider a donation.

Contributing

• Report issues on GitHub
• Submit pull requests

Credits

This plugin uses the BoardGameGeek XML API 2 to fetch game data. All game information is provided by BoardGameGeek.

All game data is property of BoardGameGeek and its users. Usage of this plugin is subject to BoardGameGeek's Terms of Service and XML API Terms of Use.

Built for the Obsidian community.