Board Game Picker

A python-coded app allowing you populate a local database of your collection and narrow down your choices for a game night. Good times.

Premise

An SQLite DB (empty XML creation example included) containing a user's board game collection information (exportable from BoardGameGeek) in several tables:

1. Game List - basic information displayed on the BGG header
2. Expansions - tagged, and therefore stored, separately from the main games
3. Ancillary tables - mechanics, categories, etc., which must be obtained through the BGG API

After this DB is populated, running the streamlit app will allow you to randomly pick and/or narrow down choices fitting specific criteria.

Required installed packages

1. pandas
2. streamlit

Other packages (sqlite3, xml, requests, etc.) should be part of the standard python library, but may be pip installed if needed.

Usage

First, ensure that your DB path is specified in both data_populate/sql_tasks.py and game_picker/sql_pull.py and you fill out your BGG username in data_populate/data_retrieve.py.

Filling out the tables

The data_populate folder serves two functions relating to the database filling:

1. Compare your current BGG game list to what's in the database, retrieve base information on any missing, assigning them sequential IDs in SQLite
2. Populate category, designer, etc. tables based on the XML from BGG

cd game-works/data_populate
python3 main.py

This will populate the main and auxiliary tables with mechanics, categories, etc. A sleep function is included to not overwhelm the BGG API

Running the app

Locally running the picker app just involves activating streamlit - this will warm the cache on first go and allow the app to be network-accessible.

cd game-works/game_picker
streamlit run game_picker.py