Set Up reads one public BoardGameGeek collection — the shelf where the games physically are — keeps the games that fit how many people are at the table and how long you have, and ranks them. A second username adds a guest's shelf. This page explains where every number comes from, how the ranking works and what the program cannot know.
collection endpoint: the games marked Own (expansions excluded), with player counts and play times as listed on BGG, the owner's own rating if they gave one, the number of plays they logged and the date their collection entry last changed. With a guest, the guest's owned games and their Want to play list too. Read when you press Go; BGG sometimes queues a collection for a few seconds before it answers, and the program waits.thing endpoint: the community's best-player-count poll, the age poll, the average weight (BGG's 1–5 complexity vote), categories, mechanics, the Bayesian average and the BGG rank. These barely move, so each game's facts are kept for 30 days.With N people and T minutes, a game fits when its box range covers N (min players ≤ N ≤ max players; "7+" means seven or more) and its play time — the box maximum when BGG lists one — is at most T + 15 minutes ("180+" has no limit). A weight setting keeps light (under 2.0), medium (2.0–3.0) or heavy (over 3.0) games; a game nobody has weighed yet passes and says so. If BGG's poll says N is Not Recommended, the game is hidden behind a "show anyway" switch.
Score = fit × quality × dust. Fit is the player fit — 1.0 when N won "Best" in BGG's poll, 0.8 when it won "Recommended" or the poll has no call yet — times the time fit: 1 when the game ends within T, tapering to 0.6 at T + 15. Quality is the owner's own rating ÷ 10 when they rated it, otherwise BGG's Bayesian average ÷ 10, and never below 0.5, so an unrated game is not buried. Dust applies when "Prefer the dusty ones" is on: ×1.15 for a game with no plays logged, ×1.10 when its collection entry has not changed in a year. The roll draws at random with odds proportional to the score; the first roll of a visit comes from the top three.
Best player count. For every player count in BGG's poll, the answer with the most votes wins — Best, Recommended or Not Recommended. A tie goes to Recommended, a count with fewer than five votes gets no call, and rows for "more than the box maximum" are ignored. Weight is BGG's average with the nearest word from its own scale: Light, Medium light, Medium, Medium heavy, Heavy.
Bracket seeds the same ranking (1 vs 8, 2 vs 7 …) and pairs first-round games from the same BGG category, finer (mechanic) as the bracket grows; the named side picks, and in party mode the other side can spin the wheel to overrule. Shelf lists the whole collection; with a guest it shows both shelves, "bring one of these" (the guest's games that fit and the host doesn't own) and "they want to play" (the guest's want-to-play list that is already on the host's shelf). Table spins for who goes first, runs a turn timer and keeps a scorepad in the tab you have open.
BGG's collection export has no last-played date: "last touched" is when the collection entry last changed (a rating, a status, a logged play), a proxy rather than a play date. Plays count only if the owner logs them on BGG. Box play times are the publisher's estimate, and a young game's poll can be thin. A collection hidden or empty on BGG gives nothing to rank.
Pages that answer "is this game good with 2, 4 or 6 players?" and lists by player count, play time, category and mechanic are built from the game facts cache described above — so they exist only for games whose facts the site has fetched, and they appear once BoardGameGeek access is live. A game page is offered to search engines when at least 1,000 BGG users rated the game or its BGG rank is 3,000 or better; the rest stay online for visitors and carry noindex.
Set Up is a program from Somebody Decide, a small software studio operated by RapidShift, LLC. Small free programs that settle the arguments friends have. Every program follows the same rules as this one: public data only, no accounts, nothing about you stored on a server, and the whole method written down on a page like this.
Corrections, questions and takedown requests: a public contact address is being set up and will appear here; this page is regenerated on every build. See also Legal & privacy.
Set Up is a free tool: type a BoardGameGeek username, say how many are playing and how long you have, and it ranks the games on that shelf that fit tonight — then a roll, a bracket or the wheel settles it. Game data from BoardGameGeek's XML API, displayed as BGG publishes it. Powered by BGG — not affiliated with or endorsed by BoardGameGeek. page updated 2026-09-23 · a Somebody Decide program. How it works · Legal & privacy · Demo shelf