Stop Staring at the Shelf

You know the scene. Everyone has a drink, the table is clear, and four adults are standing in front of a Kallax shelf saying "I'm up for anything" while playing nothing. Twenty minutes later somebody suggests the same game you always play, and half the group sighs and sits down.

The problem is that an open shelf is a terrible interface. Fifty options and no structure means the loudest preference wins, or worse, nobody states a preference at all and you default to whatever got played last time. Voting doesn't fix it either. Put a stack of boxes on the table and ask people to pick, and you get a negotiation about which two people are willing to lose, which takes exactly as long as browsing did and leaves someone annoyed on top of it.

A single random pick has the same problem from the other direction. Plenty of tools will hand you one suggestion and call the decision solved, but a lone dictate removes the group from the choice entirely, and someone usually has a reason that particular game is wrong for tonight. The right number sits in between: enough structure that nobody's standing in front of fifty boxes, enough choice left that it still feels like the group decided.

A menu fixes this the same way it does at a restaurant. Nobody stands in front of a kitchen deciding what to cook; they pick from a short, pre-filtered list. Three options, clearly framed, and the group picks. The structure I use:

1. An opener. Something light that starts while people are still settling in, finding snacks, or arriving late. Fifteen to thirty minutes, and forgiving enough that someone learning the rules on the fly doesn't sink the table.
2. The main event. The game you actually gathered for, sized to the number of people who showed up. This is usually where the deepest part of a collection lives, so it's also the course with the most to choose from.
3. A wildcard. Something heavier, held in reserve. Some nights the group has the energy for it. Some nights the opener runs twice and that's fine too — the wildcard existing as an option is the point, not playing it every time.

Board Game Menu builds that lineup from your own BGG collection. Type a username, pick a player count, and it deals three courses: light, medium, heavy (the reasoning behind those three bands is its own article, if you want it). Check "prefer games rated best at this player count" and the site will reach for whatever your group's exact size is actually rated best at on BGG, before falling back to anything that merely supports the count. If somebody vetoes one pick, lock the ones you like and reroll — only the vetoed game gets swapped out. Reroll the whole course instead if you want a clean slate for it.

Say a table of five gets a menu back and the wildcard is a game two people have already burned out on. Lock the opener and the main course, leave the wildcard unlocked, and hit reroll on just that course. The other two picks don't move. What comes back is a different heavy game, still sized for five, and you didn't have to regenerate the whole night to fix one bad pick.

Player counts also change mid-evening more often than plans survive contact with reality. Someone leaves early, a late arrival doubles the table, somebody's kid wanders in wanting to play too. None of that needs a fresh start: change the number and generate again. It's a different request, not a different tool, and the three courses reshuffle to fit whoever's actually still sitting there.

Once the lineup looks right, print it. Every menu on this site is built to come out of a browser's print dialog as a real paper menu, buttons and navigation stripped out automatically, which is worth doing for reasons the article on printing covers in more depth than fits here.

Every menu also lives at a specific link, and that link is the whole menu, not just a pointer to the tool. The player count, the picks, and a seed that reproduces exactly those picks are all sitting in the URL. Send that link to the group chat and whoever opens it sees the same three courses you saw, not a freshly rolled set. Share the link with the group before people arrive. Arguments that happen over text before game night are shorter than arguments that happen standing at the shelf, and by the time people walk in, the only decision left is which chair to take.