BoardGame-O-Matic

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BoardGame
-O-Matic

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Find your matching board games

Whether you haven’t played any games for ages or whether you dream of optimizing your card engine at night: With the BoardGame-O-Matic, you can find board and card games that suit your preferences. Answer the six short questions, set the filters and let the matching tool tell you which games you have the highest match with.

Start matching!
Screenshot of the results view of the BoardGame-O-Matic
Start matching!

Questions & answers about the BoardGame-O-Matic

The BoardGame-O-Matic is a simple online tool that helps you find board and card games that suit your preferences. To do this, you first answer a few short questions, for example about the desired level of difficulty and the duration of the game. You can also double-weight your answers if certain aspects are particularly important to you. The tool then suggests the board and card games that most closely match your answers.

The functionality of the BoardGame-O-Matic is directly derived from the “Wahl-O-Mat” of the German Federal Agency for Civic Education.

Board games are one of the most enjoyable leisure activities. The BoardGame-O-Matic is designed to provide easy access to the hobby – especially for people who have hardly ever dealt with the subject before. Great games for every taste are published every year. It’s a shame that many people only know very old games like Monopoly or Risk – especially as there are now countless newer games that are mechanically and thematically much better. The BoardGame-O-Matic should help you to find them!

Of course, you can also use the BoardGame-O-Matic if you are already fully immersed in the board game hobby to get additional inspiration. Perhaps there is a game that suits your preferences perfectly and that you have overlooked so far?

The matching algorithm works in a very simple way. To calculate your match with a specific game, each question is considered individually and your answer is compared to the value of the game.

Let’s take the game Cascadia as an example. First, we look at the question about the difficulty level. Let’s assume you have selected the option “Beginner-friendly” for this question. The value of the game for this question is also “Beginner-friendly”. Therefore, you have a full match (1 point) for this question. For the next question about the duration, you have chosen the option “Up to 45 min”. Cascadia has a duration of 45 – 90 min. You therefore do not have a full match, but it is close (0.75 points). This procedure is now carried out for all questions and then your overall match with the game is calculated. If you have chosen answer options equal or similar to the values of Cascadia for the other questions as well, the overall match will be high. The game will probably appear in your top 10 (unless there are ten other games with which you have an even higher match).

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  • No exclusion, only weighting: No games are excluded by the matching algorithm. Only the order is influenced. A game that does not match your answers to the questions at all will still appear in your ranking - in one of the last places.
    • The question about the number of players at the very beginning is not a question that is treated like the others, but a filter (see below). Therefore, this one leads to the exclusion of games.
  • Skip questions: If you skip a question, it will not be taken into account by the matching algorithm at all. It is then as if the question does not even exist.
  • Match per question: In the results view, you can see how well your answers match the respective values of a game. To do this, go to the tab "Results" (the one you are in by default) and click on the button “Details” of one the games. You will see the values of the game for the questions and next to them the degree of agreement with your answer (0 - 100 %).
  • Special questions: Questions 5 (“Language requirements”) and 6 (“Recency”) differ slightly from the other questions. There are only two answer options here: “Yes, as little text as possible” or “Yes, new games if possible” and “Don't care” (which is identical to skipping). This is because other answer options would make little sense for these questions (who would want the suggested games to have as much text as possible or to be as old as possible). If you select the affirmative answer option for these questions, this is treated in the same way as for the other questions. So if I select in question 5 that I want as little text as possible, I have a full match with games with no text at all (1 point), half a match with games with some text (0.5 points) and no match at all with games that have a lot of text (0 points).
  • Filters: In addition to the questions (which do not exclude games, see above), there are also filters. Filters can be used to completely exclude games from your ranking. The most important filter is the one for the number of players - this is why you will be shown a card before the very first question on which you can set this filter. In the results view, you can then switch to the “Filter” tab to change the “Number of players” filter or set other filters. Each filter works in the same way:
    • Several selected options within a filter are linked with OR; for example, if you select the options “3” and “4” for the “Number of players” filter, all games that can be played by three or four players will be displayed (i.e. all games that cannot be played by three or four players will be excluded).
    • If you have set several different filters, these are linked with AND; for example, if you have selected the option “2” for the “Number of players” filter and the option “Science fiction” for “Themes”, then only games that can be played by two players and are about science fiction will be displayed.

There are an enormous number of games (more than 160,000 are listed on the BoardGameGeek platform). The algorithms in BoardGame-O-Matic are not designed for such a huge amount of data. In addition, such a large number of games would not make sense. Surely there would be several games for every possible combination of answers that would have a match of 100%. Presumably, however, many of the (alleged) top matches would no longer be available at all (e.g. because they had a print run of 500 copies at some point in the 90s). Furthermore, there would be no quality control; after all, not every board and card game that has ever been invented and published has the quality to be recommended at all.

The aim of this BoardGame-O-Matic is therefore not to cover all games, but to offer a large, diverse and high-quality selection with something for everyone. To achieve this in a simple way, the BoardGame-O-Matic makes use of the user ratings on BoardGameGeek (BGG). Those 500 board and card games that have the best overall rating from the community on the platform (as of February 2025) currently form the selection of the BoardGame-O-Matic (or rather this BoardGame-O-Matic at boardgame-o-matic.de/app; other instances of the tool may have a completely different selection of games, see below).

The BGG Top 500 contains a high-quality and diverse selection of games for a wide variety of tastes. Naturally, however, there are still some good games missing. That’s why I plan to expand the selection and update it regularly so that completely new games will also appear. With your support, something will come of it!

The data comes from various sources.

  • The majority comes from the public platform BoardGameGeek (BGG), where users can enter, categorize and rate all kinds of games. Where necessary, the data was then used to cluster the games into categories. For example, BGG does not use five levels of difficulty like BoardGame-O-Matic, but a scale from 1 to 5 including decimal numbers. The classification into the five categories that exist in the BoardGame-O-Matic is based on a rule designed to the best of my knowledge (everything under 1.6 is “Super easy”; between 1.6 and 2.25 is “Beginner-friendly”; 2.25 to 3.0 is “Moderate”; 3.0 to 3.5 is “Challenging”; and everything over 3.5 is “For experts”).
  • The BGG data was retrieved via the public XML API. The only exception is the short description of the games (the teaser, which can also be seen when the details are collapsed). Because this is not included in the XML API for some reason, BGG’s internal JSON API is used for this.
  • Some of the data was generated with the help of ChatGPT (mostly with the gpt-4o model). For this purpose, data about the games was retrieved from the BoardGameGeek API, inserted into a prompt and sent to ChatGPT via API. For example, the longer descriptions of the games were generated in this way because BGG does not contain standardized description texts for the games (the descriptions on BGG differ massively in length, style and quality and would therefore be unsuitable for the BoardGame-O-Matic). Therefore, all available data for a game was retrieved from BGG and assembled into a prompt so that ChatGPT can create a standardized description for the game.
  • Occasionally, data was corrected manually, i.e. the data from BGG or ChatGPT was overwritten. However, this has been the exception so far, even though it would certainly make sense in some places. If you would like to help me with this, please get in touch!

Yes, that’s exactly what the BoardGame-O-Matic is for! You can find out more here.

I (Felix Englisch) have created the BoardGame-O-Matic and I make it available on this website. The whole thing is a hobby project of mine that I am currently working on alone – but I hope that this will change soon!

The code for the tool does not come from me alone, but is originally based on the open source tool Mat-O-Wahl.

Absolutely! As much as I enjoy working on this project, I don’t want to do everything on my own (I don’t enjoy all tasks equally). At least one other person needs to lend a hand to get the BoardGame-O-Matic off the ground. Here I describe in more detail what that means.

Keep them coming!

Create your own BoardGame-O-Matic!

Do you work in a board game café or rental shop and want to help your guests find the right game from your large selection? Or do you simply have a large private collection and want to surprise your friends with a personalized matching tool especially for your collection at your next game night? Then you’ve come to the right place!

The software behind the BoardGame-O-Matic is open source and highly configurable. You don’t have to be able to program, but a little technical understanding definitely helps (although you can also get help from ChatGPT).

You can find the repository boardgame-o-matic on GitHub. You can simply fork it and then customize your own version as described. Of course, you do not have to enter the data for the games in your collection manually, but there is a script that automatically reads them from BoardGameGeek.

If you have any questions that even Google or ChatGPT don’t know the answer to, feel free to get in touch. As soon as you are satisfied, you can upload your BoardGame-O-Matic – on your own web space or via free offers such as GitHub Pages. You already have your own Board Game O-Mat (which doesn’t even have to be called “BoardGame-O-Matic” if we don’t like the name)!

Go to GitHub!

The BoardGame-O-Matic is unfinished...

The online tool itself is no longer a simple prototype, but it is not a finished product either. Perhaps much more important, however, is the surrounding stuff (including this website here). What is currently missing is a clear vision of what the BoardGame-O-Matic should become and a strategy to achieve it – not only in terms of technical development, but also in terms of publicity, content maintenance, cooperation with like-minded stakeholders, etc.

For me, the BoardGame-O-Matic is a hobby and a project close to my heart. But I don’t feel like doing it all by myself in the long term. I’m not a fan of solo games either – I’d much rather turn it into a small co-op campaign.

... but you can change that!

Are board games close to your heart? Do you like the idea behind the BoardGame-O-Matic? Do you agree that a tool like this can help to make the hobby more popular among the general public? Great! You can get involved in the following ways:

  • Ideas and suggestions for improvement are always welcome (even if you don’t have the time or inclination to implement them yourself). Feel free to write to me!
  • Spread the word! Both in the board game world and beyond, the BoardGame-O-Matic must of course first become better known before it can have any impact. How you can contribute to this – by sharing a link in your group chat or a shoutout in your podcast – is something you can best judge for yourself.
  • Get involved! To really get off the ground, the BoardGame-O-Matic needs a small team (ideally two to four people in my opinion). There is enough to do, e.g.
    • Vision & Strategy
    • Publicising
    • Quality improvement (questions, filters and game data)
    • Cooperations
    • Further technical development

    If you would like to get involved and have some time to do so, please get in touch!

Get involved now!