Me and the wife are off to Airecon 2025 this year, as we’ve done since 2019. For those that don’t know, Airecon is large board game convention which takes place in Harrogate each year (now in its tenth year!). Many gamers get descend to try the latest board games on demo from various publishers, play games with others, buy and swap games and much more.
It gets a bit busy so I can see how it might overwhelm newcomers but overall it’s a safe and friendly space filled with people who are looking to indulge in the hobby and have a fun weekend.
Why have I uploaded a load of board games to the site?
Over the last few years I’ve recorded my growing board game collection on Board Game Geek (BGG) I’ve also recorded games that I’m interested in playing. Airecon has a library of over 1000 games you can borrow from over the course of a weekend and, certainly on my first Airecon visit, this was a bit overwhelming and I didn’t know where to start.
On our second visit to Airecon I’d built a spreadsheet which correlated games in my “Want to play” list with those in the Airecon library. It was important to quickly see what I fancied having a go at and filter down all the noise. On top of that, I copied in information about how many players the game needed and how difficult it was to learn (BGG calls this “weight” with the higher number being more complex to learn).
So, I had the idea this year, to build this on my personal web space.
It helps to have a project
Querying APIs and pulling in information is always fun to do and it’s good practice for my day job working as a Senior Engineer.
BGG have an XML based API where you can extract data from their site, such as a user’s “Want to play” collection, which is absolutely perfect for my needs.
There were a few initial challenges along the way with transforming the XML data and trying to stagger the amount of requests made when bulk importing the data but I’ve had some good fun with this.
Ready to go!
Now I’ve got the perfect Airecon companion.
I can see quickly at a glance, what’s in the Airecon library that I want to play, filter it by player count and see/sort games by their difficulty to learn and a number of other stats.
Time to share a link with friends I know who will be there, to see if they want me to bring anything from my collection!