Connecting Your BGG Collection

Board Game Menu has no accounts and no login. You type a BGG username, and the site reads that user's public collection, keeps the games marked as owned, and builds a menu from those. That's the whole data relationship. There's no OAuth handshake, no "connect your BGG account" button, nothing to authorize. It's the same public page anyone gets by typing your profile URL into a browser; the site just reads it for you and does the sorting.

For it to work, three things need to be true on the BGG side. The collection has to be public, which is BGG's default. The games you want suggested need to be marked owned, not wishlisted or previously owned. And the username needs to be spelled the way BGG spells it.

If you get an empty result or an error, it's almost always one of these:

• The username doesn't exist on BGG, usually a typo. This fails immediately with its own message instead of an empty menu, so a misspelling doesn't look the same as a private or empty collection.
• The collection is set to private in BGG's collection settings.
• Nothing is marked owned. Some people track hundreds of games on BGG and own twelve of them.
• No owned game supports the player count you picked. Try a different count and see if the menu comes back.

Speed is its own topic, and it breaks into two separate waits with two separate causes. The first is fetching the collection itself. On a brand-new username, BGG sometimes needs a moment to prepare that export on their end before handing it over, so the very first request for a name can take a bit longer than the ones after it. This site caches the result once it arrives, for about a month, so every lookup after the first is fast regardless.

The second wait is complexity ratings, and it's the more visible one. Every game needs a weight before it can be sorted into a course, and if this is the first time anyone's asked about a particular game, that number has to come from BGG too. BGG will only hand over twenty games' worth of ratings per request, and the site paces those requests to stay polite to BGG's servers rather than hammering them. A modest collection clears this in one pass. A few hundred games you've never generated a menu for before might take several rounds, which is what the kitchen animation on the generate screen is actually waiting on: real progress toward a real number, not decoration. It only happens once per game, ever, because weight ratings get cached for a year and shared across every visitor. Gloomhaven's complexity rating doesn't depend on whose shelf it's sitting on, so once anyone has looked it up, everyone benefits.

If you're regenerating rapidly, like testing player counts back to back, there's also a cap on how many requests one visitor can make per minute. Normal use, including rerolls, never comes close to it. The limit is there to stop the tool from being turned into a free way to hammer BGG's API.

Households that split a shelf across two BGG accounts run into a real limit here: the site reads one username at a time, and there's no way to merge two collections into a single menu. If you and a partner each log games separately, generate from whichever account has more of the shelf recorded, or use BGG's own collection tools to move everything onto one account if this comes up often enough to be annoying.

Nothing is stored about you personally. No password, no email, nothing typed except the username, and that only gets used to ask BGG for public data anyone could see by visiting your profile.