The idea
There are more than 26,000 board games out there, and picking one is genuinely hard. The usual advice is a "top 100" list, but a global top 100 answers a question nobody asked. The best game in the world is the wrong recommendation if it takes four hours, needs exactly four adults, and you are looking for something for a nine-year-old and their grandmother on a Sunday afternoon.
Everything needed to answer that better question already exists in public data: player counts, minimum age, playing time, a community complexity score, ratings from tens of thousands of players, and category rankings. It is just buried in a database that is not built for a person in a shop with ten minutes to decide.
So that is what this site is: constraints in, a short shortlist out. No accounts, no newsletter wall, no sponsored placements — you set the filters and we show the highest-rated games that satisfy every one of them.
What you can do here
Search by name
Know the title already? Type any part of it. Exact matches come first, then the most-rated games, so "catan" finds Catan rather than its twentieth expansion.
Get a top 5
Set any combination of genre, player count, age, and experience level and get the five best-rated games that match. Page through for the next five if none of them land.
Check the details
Click any result for the full card: players, playing time, minimum age, complexity weight, community rank and rating, and the game's own description.
How the recommendations work
We would rather show our workings than pretend there is a secret algorithm. When you press Find top 5, we run one query with only the filters you actually chose:
- Genre — the game must be ranked in that category (Strategy, Family, Party, Thematic, Abstract, Wargame, Children's, or Customizable).
- Min / max players — the game's supported player range has to sit inside the range you asked for.
- Age — the publisher's recommended minimum age is at least the age you picked.
- Experience — based on the community complexity score ("weight", 1–5): Beginner is under 2, Intermediate is 2–3.5, Expert is above 3.5.
Two rules apply to every search, whatever you select:
- Expansions are excluded. You are looking for a game to play, not an add-on to a game you may not own.
- At least 100 ratings. A 9.6 from eleven people is the designer's friends, not a recommendation.
What survives all of that is sorted by average community rating, best first. If a filter combination returns nothing, that is a real answer too — it usually means the constraints are contradictory, and loosening the strictest one (often Age or Max players) is the fastest fix.
Who it's for
Concretely, these are the situations the site is built around:
🎁 You're buying a gift
You know roughly how old they are and how many people they play with, and nothing else. That is exactly two filters — enough for a solid shortlist you can check against a shop's stock.
👪 Family game night
Mixed ages around one table. Set Age to the youngest player and Experience to Beginner or Intermediate, and you get games everyone can actually follow.
🎉 A party with eight people
The player-count filter is the one most lists ignore. Set Max players to 8 or 10+ and the four-player-only classics disappear from the results.
🌱 You're new to the hobby
Genre: Family or Strategy, Experience: Beginner. This is the shortest route to the well-loved gateway games without wading through hobbyist arguments first.
♔ Your group wants a challenge
Experience: Expert filters down to the heavy games — the ones with a rulebook worth an evening and a payoff worth a campaign.
🧠 You're playing alone
Set Min players to 1 and you get games with a designed solo mode, which is a surprisingly strong and fast-growing corner of the hobby.
Where the data comes from
All game data — ratings, rankings, player counts, ages, complexity weights, artwork, and descriptions — comes from the hobby's public community database, built up over years by tens of thousands of players rating and cataloguing what they play. We store a snapshot of it and query it; we do not re-score anything ourselves. Board Game Finder is an independent project with no connection to the people who maintain that data, and every number you see is the community's rather than ours.
Which means our honest limitations are that data's limitations. Ratings skew towards enthusiasts, so heavier games tend to score above lighter ones aimed at children. Minimum ages are publisher claims, not testing results. Very new or very obscure releases may not have 100 ratings yet and so will not appear. And a rating is an average of other people's taste — a shortlist is a starting point, not a verdict.
What's next
We are adding a blog with buyer's guides, explanations of how the numbers actually behave, and themed lists for the situations the filters cannot quite express. Ideas, corrections, and "your site recommended something ridiculous" reports are all welcome.
Reach us at hello@pickyourboardgame.com.