One year and a week ago we reached 1 million tracked board games.
That first million took around 5 years ^^ we just reached 1.6 million tracked games now

Kallax.io is a community tool for organizing your board games, search in combined collections, plan board game nights and engage with your local board game community.

We are now fully funded by donations. No ads, no tracking, no affiliate since 2021 ❤︎⁠

The feedback from last year was a huge help and most has been implemented!
Quick update of what we have been up to, before I go into hiding for another year :)

Collections Stats 📊
I added some statistics and it gives you a collector type. It's inspired by an old tool that gave you a collectors DNA but that site doesn't exist anymore, sadly. You can see my results here or go to that link and enter your BGG username to see your own stats.

I ran it across our user base and these are the results.

Improved Events 💌
The main thing I have been trying to improve over the last year is our board game night planner features. The UI has been updated to work better on mobile and some features have been added.

- RSVP with one-click guest account
- Bring a friend (+1) without an account [NEW]
- Vote for when to meet up
- Vote for what to play
- Hauling list (coordinate who brings what)
- Chat room for the event participants
- Chat room direct messages [NEW]
- Divide event into tables [NEW]
- Upload and share images [NEW]
- Invite via link, e-mail, QR-code or in-app friend system

Improved Collection Management 🗃️
You can see the screenshot attached. Your expansion is now grouped under the base games. This also works for the search filters, so if you have "Blood Rage 5th Player Expansion" then Blood Rage will now show up when you set the player filter to 5! :)

We now also support groups so if you always play with the same people then you can create a group and search if it was one collection. It also gives you a small chat room and a quick way to invite everyone to events etc.

Localization 💬
We have started translating most of the website to German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Danish and French. This is based on where we are getting visits from, it just happens to also add Danish and not Swedish ;) It's still not perfect, aber mejor di nic. Let me know if you would like to help out!

Plays 🖊️
The site finally supports logging plays! I am still working on importing from BGG and BG Stats as our format differs a bit from theirs but I have made sure it is compatible.

We store Plays and Sessions.
It's allows us to store that you played 20 minutes of Codenames and then Axis & Allies (multiple games in one session). It also allows us to store that you didn't finish that play of A&A until the next weekend (one game that spans over multiple sessions).

You can also upload pictures (we downscale to 512x512 though so keep the originals) and we support community scoring templates. So once one person has set up the scoring template, if they choose to share, no one else have to.

Template supports meta data (such as faction) on the player and also how different things scores for example Longest Road in Catan as a bonus only one user can have or look-up table (such as sheep in Agricola).

Others
Automatic daily synchronization with BGG and we also got an official BGG badge.
Our very first merchandise (stickers) what you might have been lucky to find at SPIEL Essen.
A tool to find the expansions you are missing. I probably forgot a bunch of stuff.

Hey where is the link? Here -
https://kallax.io/tools/statistics

Feedback is as always appreciated!
I know there is a lot of posts in the r/boardgames for apps, web pages and so on. Especially this last year has been wild, so I limit myself to one update per year. See ya' next year.

Juegazo en la comunidad Boardgames de San Lucas Sacatepéquez, Guatemala ❤️

Todos los viernes en Bloom Ramyeon cerca del parque

Primera vez jugando blood rage y todo lo que pasó fue intenso, un empate donde se perdieron muchas figuras, una lucha en Yggdrasyl justo antes del final y mueren 4 de cada bando con los cuervos como ganadores con 148 puntos, seguido de 146, 89,79 y 40? Jajajja

uuuufff una partidaza deverdad

This really seems to be the golden age of interesting board games that have been designed to be clever, mentally stimulating, while also featuring great artwork. The trouble is that they are complex enough that it’s hard to convince friends who are not already into board games to learn how to play. Has anyone come across approaches to make it easier to teach rules to friends in a way that is interesting and fun? Everyone has such different learning styles (and patience levels).

A debate came up at the table during my last session.

Say you’re playing a game where players have various passive abilities in play and/or certain units with unique abilities. This information is public (i.e., cards are face up on the table) but due to text size etc it’s not really practical to read everyone’s cards easily on the table.

Everyone announces what their cards do at the time when they are put in play. But what about later turns? What’s your obligation to remind others of what you can do or how your cards will resolve an interaction?

Last game for example I had a unit that would be able to remove one enemy unit during a battle. However this did not trigger immediately when the battle was declared but only right before the “reveal” phase (after players had committed the units they would be risking in the battle and what cards they had chosen to play).

My default assumption was I have no duty to remind other players that I would be able to remove that one enemy unit right before the combat resolved, and that it’s their responsibility to keep other players’ active cards in mind as they make their choices.

The table was 50/50 split on this, with some saying that I should be reminding everyone of the power at the beginning of the battle so players could make their choices accordingly. The logic was that there was too much information on the table for anyone to be able to keep track of it all.

After arguing about this for a bit, as a compromise, we ended up imposing no duty to announce your abilities until the ability actually triggered (provided you had announced your card’s power at the time it entered play). But, any player could ask another player what “relevant” cards they had in play at any time before committing to their decision.

This too felt very clunky and led to everyone asking everyone else constantly what abilities they had in play. It also seemed to take a type of skill (being able to keep track of your opponent’s abilities) out of the game.

I don’t think the particular game was that complex, our group has definitely played and enjoyed more complex games. However the size of the face-up cards and text did make it impractical to simply look at your opponent’s player area and readily determine what public information was present.

Has anyone else had this kind of debate at your table?

edit: because it has been mentioned several times, everyone was on equal footing with the game as far as experience. This was not our first time with this game, although there’s enough unique cards that no one would’ve known all of them

Just got this and wanted to know more about it. is it actually a good game? I have played root with expansion and few other complex ones so wanted to know some opinions.

Edit: I didn’t pay, got it from someone.

Hi! I'm new to the board game community and am absolutely fascinated by the amount of work put into creating games and playing them! I love educational games (and am working on a game rn!) and entertainment games as well. I would love to play some of these boardgames, but unfortunately, I am struggling to find the right group of people to play these games with. Is there any community/gathering in Netherlands where people come together to play? Thanks for reading!

Dino Racer was initially due for release at some point in October and we're nearing the end of the month and I haven't seen any updates. I think we're all too familiar with timelines pushing, but what was more concerning is that for the last few days underdoggames.com doesn't seem to be loading either? In addition, they don't appear to be actively responding to questions/concerns according to some on bgg.

Has anyone heard anything recently?

I'm trying not to jump to conclusions, but the combination of the missed release window, the website being broken, and the lack of communication is concerning.

Hey everyone,

At a board game convention recently, I saw a really neat accessory setup that I'm trying to find, but I don't know the exact English terms for it.

It was a heavy-duty, flexible metal gooseneck arm with a desk clamp on one end, and a small flat board/tray attached to the top to hold game components, cards, or dice. The arm was stiff enough to be bent into position and stay rigid without sagging.

Does anyone know what this type of arm or shelf setup is officially called, or how I can search for it (on Amazon or elsewhere)? Thanks!

I absolutely love playing games with my kids (13, 11, 7, 5) and I have a teensy tiny collection of board games (barely 200+ games plus just a few expansions… like the entire Legendary Marvel collection and the entire Arkham Horror LCG collection, like I said, teensy tiny) and we’ve started to play more complex games.

I’m currently playing DC Legendary with my 11yo daughter and gosh golly gee, wouldn’t you know it, we just manage to squeak out a victory every time.

95% of me says “spending quality time with your daughter who’s having a blast and increasing her nerdiness is an added bonus, just have fun”, buuuut there is that 5% of me that murmurs “constantly greasing the skids so she wins isn’t teaching her valuable life lessons.”

I have started to play more straight up with my 13yo daughter, she figured out when I kept asking her was her score was first and then my score was magically 2-3 below hers every single time was more than shocking coincidence :)

I’m hoping to not have this turn into some political s***show about “kids these days”, just genuinely interested in how other adults have approached this topic.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

My wife recently passed away and we were huge board game lovers. I would like to get a tattoo to include small pieces of her favorite games but struggling how to design it and would like ideas/opinions from a community that understands the details of all of these games. My initial thoughts are something like the pieces falling down my leg but unsure how to flow them together. These are some of her fav games not that it has to include them all- ticket to ride, wingspan, wyrmspan, catan, quacks, welcome to, azul, harmonies, raccoon tycoon, flamecraft, critter kitchen, river valley, sagrada, creature comforts, trinket trove, everdell, tea witches and harmonies. This means so much to me and I appreciate any input. Thank you!

Hey people, first post here. This is our little collection so far!. We first bougth Carcassonne in march, it was the discovery of the whole world of modern boradgames for us. We played a lot for two weeks and then kinda dropped it. A couple months ago we saw Agricola and Clank in a store nearby and bougth both, then the adicction came and started buying what our third world wallet let us (and what is available here) Everything was a hit so far!
Now we are thinking about get Spirit Island since we saw it is back in stock here (and restocks happen even more rarely over here)
Replayability is something we look for in games as space and money are limiting factors for us, we don't plan to have a huge collection.
Watcha think? Do you recommend something?

Hi guys

I want to buy aeons end.

Should buy Base Set with the first 2 expansion for 45€ or new Age for 70€ or maybe even eternal?

I want to order today:)

My gf and I have a current rotation of
Monopoly deal
Agent Avenue
Sky team

and was wondering what people would recommend we try next?

I heard of bomb busters but I heard that it isn’t fun with 2 people
I heard of splendor duel but we’ve never played the original splendor and not sure if that matters.

We’re looking for fun 2 players that take under an hour

Lords of Waterdeep is my go to for introducing new people to worker placement but is there another 5 player game that would appeal to people not in to this theme and is the same ease of teach? Nothing over this weight rating in difficulty.

These cheap "mint tins" from Amazon continue to be my go-to for budget friendly board game component organization. In addition to re-upping my go-to size, I bought some BIGGER sized containers as well!

If you backed Tanares Adventures, you might remember the backlash when the game was fulfilled with the messiest rulebook. It was convoluted and really cumbersome.

Then they launched a second printing with a pricey fix to all those issues. I don't remember the exact price because I didn't back it, but it left a sour taste in my mouth.

Now with Tanares Dungeons, they're offering an upgrade completely free to returning backers if you just get the base pledge. Seems enticing, but I feel like this is textbook sunk-cost fallacy. After my first playthrough of Tanares Adventures, I loved the gameplay, but decided I'd never go through the setup again because it was so painful.

A while ago some friends of mine were discussing games like chess, shogi, Boggle, and Scrabble.

I have no problem with any of these games. While chess and shogi are explicitly 2-player, and that does become a problem when you have a group, I think that’s a scalability issue, not an inherent reason not to play chess or shogi. They’re not for party settings, but they’re some of the best games of all time.

However Scrabble doesn’t have this issue until the orbit gets very long, and Boggle doesn’t have it at all. I think these games are also very very good since they scale well and are pretty intuitive. The biggest issue is they aren’t very nice to non-native English speakers.

In all of these games, there is a very wide range of skill that you can expect to exist if you take a random sample of people who have ever played any of these games.

My friends see this as an issue: they don’t feel like they have much of a chance in Boggle or Chess against more experienced player, so they say they don’t like to play those games. Also, my roommate outright refuses to play me in chess now that I have beaten him fairly easily, but has no issue steamrolling random guests, and invites them to play.

Personally, since these games don’t have player elimination, I have no issue playing them against much stronger players. I’m used to diving into unfamiliar games with people who are quite familiar with it (e.g. Root, Catan, and the first game I played with this group: Dune 1979, of all things), so I’m used to getting steamrolled.

What do you think? Do you not refuse to play because of skill gap? Or do you think having a skill range is an inherent issue of a board game?

Finally receiving my 4x6 Kingswood table from Boxking this weekend. Currently shopping for good game session chairs, but have been struggling to find the measurements of the table - specifically from the floor to the bottom of the table surface.

Figured the best chairs are ones with arms, but want to confirm what the max height is for the chair arms so that the chairs can be pushed in under the table when not in use.

Hopefully someone here with a Kingswood can give me a measurement of their table height.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Overwhelming responses about the perils of having it be too long. Excellent insight that I hadn't really considered. I appreciate the responses. I'm either going to make it too short or possibly dive into a pet project of cutting the mat myself.

Looking at buying a neoprene mat, but I haven't found any that fit my table's exact dimensions. Probably happens all the time. So I can buy one that's a little short or a little long. For those who don't have a perfect fit, how does your mat lay on your table, and do you like it that way?

I'm considering one option where the mat is narrower than the table but longer, so it may hang over on the ends while being a little short on the sides where I usually have players, but sometimes I will have enough players to sit on the ends, so I'm not sure I want to go that route either.