What Is the Pub Meeple Ranking Engine Used For?

Updated

The Pub Meeple Ranking Engine is a tool for ranking board games and other items, and it is now the main feature of Pub Meeple. According to the site, Pub Meeple "has historically been a gaming and content creation group" that produced YouTube videos, articles, a podcast, and other gaming resources. Over time, the site became more associated with the Ranking Engine, and the site states that "going forward, it, the resulting Rankings, and the Top Nine Tool will be the things that get the most work."

What the Ranking Engine does

The Ranking Engine is built around a simple premise the site states directly: "people like to rank stuff." Instead of asking you to assign scores or sort a list all at once, it helps you work through your games and arrive at an ordered ranking. The output is a set of Rankings — your personal ordered list — which the site treats as one of its core ongoing features alongside the engine itself.

Where it fits on Pub Meeple

Pub Meeple now centers on three connected things:

  • The Ranking Engine — the tool you use to rank your games.
  • The resulting Rankings — the ordered lists produced by the engine.
  • The Top Nine Tool — a separate generator described below.

The site notes that past resources and blog posts are still available if you want them, but the ranking-related tools are where future work is focused.

Ranking Engine vs. Top Nine Generator

These are two different tools with different purposes, and the site describes the Top Nine Generator clearly enough to separate them:

Tool What it's for Do you need a ranking first?
Ranking Engine Working through your games to produce an ordered ranking No — this is what produces the ranking
Top Nine Generator Creating a shareable Top 9 image No — the site says you can use it "without having to rank them"

The Top Nine Generator is for the case where "you already know what your top games are." You import them from BGG, click a button, and it lays them out into an image you can share. So if your goal is a shareable image rather than a full ordered list, the Top Nine Generator is the more direct route.

When the Ranking Engine is the right tool

Use the Ranking Engine when you want an actual ordered list of your games — not just a top few, but a ranking you can refer back to. Use the Top Nine Generator when you only need a visual of your favorites and don't want to rank anything.

One practical detail from the site: the Top Nine Generator works by importing your games from BGG, so having a BGG collection is the starting point for that tool. The site also references "BGG Collection Caching" in a recent article title, which points to BGG collection data being part of how these tools operate.

What to expect

Pub Meeple presents the Ranking Engine as the thing most people come to the site for, and the Rankings it produces as a lasting output rather than a one-off. If you want to rank your board games and keep that ranking, that's the tool's purpose. If you only want a shareable Top 9 image, skip the ranking step and use the Top Nine Generator instead.