TabletopRecommender.app provides board game, role playing game, and video game recommendations based on user ratings.

When you enter your boardgamegeek username, the app retrieves your game ratings and generates personalized recommendations based on users with similar preferences. It's important to note that RPG recommendations are based on RPG Item ratings, not RPG system ratings.

Let's look at an example video game recommendation:

Recommender Score

This game's recommender score is 9.6.

The recommender score represents TabletopRecommender's best guess at what you would rate the recommended game. It's a number between 1.0 and 10.0 and is derived from the ratings of boardgamegeek.com users whose tastes are similar to yours. More on recommender scores later.

Game Details

The Game Details line shows information like title, release year, developer (for videogames), player count (for boardgames), RPG system (for role playing games), and other relevant data.

Anchor Games

Under the Game Details line is a list of the recommendation's "anchor" games.

These are the games you have rated that are connected to the recommendation. The anchor game list is ordered by connection strength, with the most connected games appearing first.

Sometimes anchor games are strongly connected to a recommendation. These anchors will have parentheses after their titles with a number. The number is a connection strength ratio. An anchor with a ratio of (2) has roughly 2 times the connection strength of an anchor with no parentheses. An anchor game with (10) is ten times more connected to that recommendation.

In the example above, we can see that World of Warcraft is strongly connected to Diablo II with a connection strength ratio of (9).

Importantly, anchor game connection strength does not necessarily imply a taste relationship. A game that you dislike can be strongly connected to a game that is highly recommended to you.

Drift Mode

Click on any anchor game to enter Drift Mode.

Drift Mode displays all recommendations that are connected to an anchor game.

The Why Panel

The Why Panel shows the boardgamegeek users whose ratings are contributing to the recommendation and how those ratings influence the final recommender score.

Contributor Ratings

Users who contribute to your recommendations are taste-aligned with you. To qualify, a user must share at least one rated game with you, and at least 66% of those shared ratings must be within 0.5 points of your own.

Any shared rating that falls outside the 0.5 window must still be within 1 point of your ratings. Any disagreements larger than 1 point disqualify the user entirely from contributing to your recommendations. Only shared ratings within the 0.5 agreement window are displayed in the Why Panel and contribute to recommender scores.

The contribution weight of a contributor represents their influence on final scoring.

There are a number of other relevance and quality thresholds that contributors must meet to qualify. The contributor list for a recommendation is curated to allow only users with strong taste alignment and meaningful influence.

Final Scoring

The final scoring section displays anchor game votes derived from contributor ratings. The final recommender score is an average of these anchor game votes according to their weights.

The weight of an anchor game vote is derived from that game's connection strength ratio, among other factors.

The "Vote" score (eg: Vote: 10.0) is the normalized weighted average of contributor ratings for that anchor game.

Using a weighted average of the three votes (10.0, 8.0, and 8.0) with weights 0.5, 0.2, and 0.2, the final Recommender Score is 9.6.

Updating recommendations

If you've changed your ratings on BoardGameGeek, click "Update now >" at the top of your recommendations page to regenerate your recommendations:

Movement badges

After updating your recommendations, any new recommendations or score changes to existing recommendations will be highlighted with movement badges.

The Movers Panel

Click any movement badge to open the Movers Panel, which highlights the largest recommendation score changes and the highest-scoring new recommendations.