BoardGameHub: shared shelves that pick tonight's board game for you 2.0.0

Your members already own the games. This is where the group finally decides what to play.

Every group of board gamers has the same two problems: nobody remembers who owns what, and the evening starts with twenty minutes of "so, what are we playing?". A catalogue site cannot help, because it only knows what is printed on the box. Your forum knows who owns the game, how long it really took last time, and whether four players is the right number.

Try it in two minutes, before you buy​

Open the live demo board and log in as demo, password demo2026. Everything is prepared for that account.

Your mission: Let the table pick a game for tonight: say who turned up, how long you have and how heavy you feel, and get five suggestions read from real collections.

Start the mission on demo.xen-support.com. The board resets every night, so break whatever you like.

Click to expand...

The tour​

A board game database with collections, reviews and a table that picks tonight's game


Real playing time from logged plays, what the box says against what the table measures, and a player count poll


What should we play tonight? Say who is here and how long you have, and get five picks from your group's own shelves, each with its reasons

What it does​

• The table. Say who turned up, how long you have and what you feel like. It reads your members' declared collections, weight, best player count, how recently each game was played and what this group thinks of it, then gives five picks and explains each one in plain words. Freeze a shortlist behind a link and paste it into the thread for the evening.
• The box says, the table says. A game claims 120 minutes, your members logged 184. The game page shows both, the gap, and how many plays it is measured over.
• A player count poll that means something. Members mark each count Best, Works or Avoid, and the game page shows the verdict per count.
• The table sheet. Setup time, teaching time, footprint, language dependency, solo mode, minimum age and accessibility markers, led by the real commitment of the evening.
• Before you play. The rules every table gets wrong the first time and the house rules yours settled on, voted and sorted by the community.
• The shelf. A member's collection drawn as box spines, thickness following weight, expansions filed with their game, and a dust index for the boxes that never come out.
• Everything a database owes you. Play journal, reviews on four criteria, ratings, collections, lists, game nights, Game of the Month, rankings, a release calendar, achievements, tier lists, comparison, photos, official rules as attachments, a REST API and CSV import.
• Mention a game, get a card. The Insert board game button in the editor finds a game as you type and drops it into any post.
• It lives beside GameHub. Both run on the same forum without touching each other, with matching cards and one button each in the editor.

New in 2.0.0​

BoardGameHub 2.0 rebuilds every page with native XenForo components, so it looks like the rest of your forum in any style, light or dark, down to small phones. Soft delete, inline moderation, the approval queue, native votes, attachments and What's new now work as they do for threads, search engines get structured data, and pages are faster. Every 1.x feature is still there.

Good to know​

Requires XenForo 2.3.0 and PHP 8.0 or later. It depends on no other add-on and sends nothing to a third party unless you switch on the BoardGameGeek import, which needs an application token of your own since BoardGameGeek closed their open API in July 2025. Until then, the import screen takes a CSV file.
Upgrading from 1.x: install the archive over your current version from the Admin CP, after a backup. Your data is migrated automatically, votes are copied and photos become attachments in a background job. The decorative style properties of 1.x are replaced by five rating tier colours that follow your style, and if you edited BoardGameHub templates in a child style, revert those edits after the upgrade.

What you get​

• One payment, from €40 for a single site. No subscription.
• Twelve months of updates. Every release in that year is yours, and the add-on keeps working after it.
• A 14-day guarantee. If it does not work as described on a compatible board and support cannot fix it, you are refunded in full.
• Support from the developer. The person who wrote the code answers.
• Theme-safe. Built from XenForo's own building blocks, so it follows your style, light and dark.

From the same workshop​

• GameHub: Your community already talks about games. GameHub gives those conversations a home that looks like your forum.
• Teams: A complete community layer for XenForo.
• Level: The complete gamification & XP system for XenForo.