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What is Pub Meeple?
Pub Meeple is a board-game hobby site best known for one tool: a Ranking Engine that helps you put games (or other items) into a personal order. Its own description says it began as a gaming and content-creation group — YouTube videos, articles, a podcast — but that the Ranking Engine has become the main attraction, alongside the resulting rankings and a Top Nine Tool.
What you can actually do there
- Rank a collection: rather than scoring everything at once, you make repeated head-to-head choices, and the tool builds an ordered list from those decisions. This suits people who find “rate this 1–10” hard but know which of two games they would rather play.
- Generate a Top Nine image: if you already know your nine favourites, the Top Nine Generator imports them from BoardGameGeek and lays them out as a shareable image. No ranking process required.
- Read older material: past articles, podcast episodes and blog posts remain available, so the site is not purely a utility.
Who it is for
The clearest audience is BoardGameGeek users with medium-to-large collections. Importing from BGG removes most manual data entry, and the output — a ranked list or a Top Nine graphic — is designed to be shared in forums, social posts or group chats. A casual player with five games will get little from it; someone with 80 unplayed-or-barely-played titles gets a structured way to decide what to keep, sell or play next.
How the two tools differ
| Ranking Engine | Top Nine Generator | |
|---|---|---|
| Input | Your comparisons between items | Nine games you already chose |
| Effort | Repeated choices over time | Import and one click |
| Output | A full ordered ranking | A shareable image |
| Best for | Large collections, tough decisions | Quick “my favourites” posts |
A practical next step
If you want to try it, start with the Top Nine Generator: it is the fastest way to see whether the BGG import works with your collection and whether the image style suits you. Then move to the Ranking Engine with a bounded goal — for example, rank only your unplayed games, or only the 20 titles you are considering culling — instead of your entire shelf at once. Ranking everything is a much longer project, and a narrow question produces a result you can act on immediately.
For broader board-game cataloguing and community data, the natural companion is BoardGameGeek, which supplies the collection information these tools draw on.
How does the Ranking Engine work to rank board games?
The Ranking Engine is a comparison-based ranking tool: rather than asking you to assign scores, it presents pairs of board games and you pick the one you prefer. Repeat that enough times and the tool builds an ordered list from your choices. It has become the main focus of Pub Meeple, which previously produced videos, articles and a podcast around board games Pub Meeple.
What the process looks like in practice
You start by importing your collection, which the site supports from BoardGameGeek, so you are ranking games you actually own rather than a generic list. The engine then works through matchups. Each answer narrows the field, and the resulting order is saved as a ranking you can return to and update as your taste shifts or your collection grows.
The key trade-off is effort versus precision. A comparison-based sort is easier to answer honestly than scoring 200 games out of ten, because you only ever judge two games at once. The cost is time: the more games you include, the more matchups you face, so most people get better results by ranking a shortlist of favourites or a themed subset first.
A concrete use case
Suppose you have 150 games and want a top 20 for a year-end list. Ranking all 150 is slow, but you can import your collection, rank a pre-filtered group of candidates, and let the engine settle the order among them. The output is then something you can share or keep as a reference when someone asks what to play.
Related tools on the same site
- Top Nine Generator — for when you already know your top games and just want a shareable 3x3 image. It imports from BoardGameGeek and lays the games out for you, so no ranking pass is needed Pub Meeple.
- Saved rankings — the site treats the rankings you produce as a lasting resource, which makes it worth re-running after a big influx of new games rather than treating it as a one-off.
How to decide if it fits
Choose the Ranking Engine if you want a defensible, preference-based order and are willing to spend the matchups to get it. Choose the Top Nine Generator if the goal is presentation rather than ordering. If you mainly want collection tracking and play logging instead of ranking, a dedicated collection manager such as BoardGameGeek will serve that need better, and it is also where your import data comes from.
How can I create a Top Nine image of my favorite board games?
Use Pub Meeple's Top Nine Generator: import your board game collection from BoardGameGeek (BGG), pick the nine games you want to show, and the tool lays them out as a shareable image. It's designed for people who already know their favorites and just want the graphic, without going through a full ranking exercise.
What the workflow looks like
- Gather your BGG collection, or at least know which nine titles you want.
- Import them into the generator.
- Select your nine games.
- Generate the image and download or share it.
Because the tool pulls from BGG, keeping your BGG collection reasonably tidy makes the import smoother. If a game is missing there, it likely won't appear in the import list.
When to use it vs. the Ranking Engine
Pub Meeple's main tool is the Ranking Engine, which helps you work out an ordered list through pairwise comparisons. The Top Nine Generator skips that. The trade-off is straightforward:
| Goal | Better fit |
|---|---|
| You already know your nine favorites | Top Nine Generator |
| You want a defensible ordered top 10, 50 or 100 | Ranking Engine |
| You want a quick shareable image for social media or a group chat | Top Nine Generator |
| You enjoy the process of comparing games head-to-head | Ranking Engine |
A practical scenario: you're posting a "my nine favorite games" image in a board game forum or Discord. You know the titles instantly, so the generator is the fast path. If instead you're unsure whether Brass: Birmingham or Ark Nova belongs higher, the Ranking Engine is the tool that resolves that.
Practical considerations
The output is an image, so think about where it will live. A square layout works well for Instagram and forum posts; a wider crop may suit a blog header. Check that the game cover art BGG supplies is the edition you actually own, since different editions have different box art and that's often the first thing other players notice.
If you want to compare notes with other people's lists or find more BGG-connected tools, BoardGameGeek is the natural companion site, since your collection data lives there.
What are the Ranking Engine Awards and how are they determined?
The Ranking Engine Awards are an annual recognition tied to Pub Meeple's board-game ranking tool. Rather than a formal industry prize with a judging panel, they appear to be a community-facing, data-driven feature: the awards are derived from how users of the Ranking Engine order their own games, then surfaced as year-labeled results (the page lists "Ranking Engine Awards 2025" and "Ranking Engine Awards 2024" among its recent articles). In other words, the "determination" is collective and procedural—your rankings feed the pool, and the awards reflect aggregate outcomes rather than editorial votes.
What that means in practice
- Who it's for: BoardGameGeek users who already track a collection and enjoy comparing tastes; the tool imports from BGG, so no manual data entry is needed.
- What determines placement: Individual users' pairwise or list-based rankings, aggregated across the user base. The more people rank, the more stable the resulting order.
- What it is not: A juried award like the Spiel des Jahres or a critics' poll. Treat it as a snapshot of self-selected enthusiasts' preferences, which skews toward games popular within that community.
A concrete example
If you rank your 60-game collection in the Ranking Engine, your ordering becomes one data point. Multiply that across thousands of users and the aggregate produces the year's award list. Your personal #1 might not appear at all—that's the trade-off of crowd aggregation.
Decision criterion
Use these awards if you want a quick, community-sourced sense of what heavily-ranked players actually enjoy, especially for comparing mid-tier games that don't appear on major award lists. Don't use them as a proxy for design quality or critical consensus.
Next step: If you want the actual year-by-year award results and the methodology notes, read the dedicated posts linked from Pub Meeple's blog index at Pub Meeple. For the underlying game data and collection import, BoardGameGeek is the source.
How do I import my BoardGameGeek collection into Pub Meeple?
Pub Meeple is built around turning your BoardGameGeek (BGG) collection into ranked lists and shareable images. The import is a connection to BGG, not a file you upload manually.
To bring your collection in:
- Go to Pub Meeple and open the Ranking Engine or the Top Nine Generator.
- Choose the option to import from BoardGameGeek.
- Enter your BGG username (the one in your profile URL).
- Select the collection you want: owned games, previously owned, wishlist, or a custom subset, depending on the options shown.
- Let the tool pull the list, then start ranking or generate your Top 9 image.
A few practical notes from how BGG collections behave:
- Your BGG collection must be set to public. If it is private, Pub Meeple will not be able to read it.
- Large collections can take a moment to load. If it times out, retry or narrow the import to owned games only.
- The import reflects your BGG data at that moment. If you add games on BGG later, re-import to refresh the list.
- For the Top Nine Generator, you can import and lay out your top games without ranking them first; the Ranking Engine is for when you want the tool to help you decide the order.
Next step: if you only want a shareable image, use the Top Nine Generator and skip ranking. If you want a defensible ordered list, use the Ranking Engine and rank in small batches rather than all at once. Pub Meeple itself is at Pub Meeple, and you manage your collection at BoardGameGeek.
Can I use Pub Meeple without ranking my games first?
Yes. Pub Meeple has a separate Top Nine Generator for exactly that situation: you bring in a list of games from BoardGameGeek, pick the ones you want, and it lays them out as a shareable image. No ranking session required. The Ranking Engine is the part that asks you to compare games repeatedly; the Top Nine Tool skips that step.
When to skip ranking
Use the Top Nine Generator when you already know the games you want to show off — your current favorites, a convention haul, a shelf-of-shame lineup — and you just want a clean image for social media, a group chat or a blog post. Use the Ranking Engine instead when the point is to discover an order you can't articulate, such as deciding between forty similar mid-weight euros.
A practical scenario: someone returning from a board game convention has ten new purchases and wants a "what I bought" post that evening. Ranking all ten against each other would be tedious and pointless; the generator produces the image in a couple of minutes.
What you still need
You'll need a BoardGameGeek account, since the tool imports your collection from there. If your games aren't logged on BGG, add them first, or expect to type titles manually where the tool allows it.
The trade-off
The generator gives you a visual, not a verdict. It won't tell you whether Brass: Birmingham beats Ark Nova for you — that's the Ranking Engine's job. If you later want a defensible top ten, you can rank once and reuse the results.
For broader context on the hobby, BoardGameGeek is where the collection data comes from, and Pub Meeple itself hosts the past articles and podcast archive alongside these tools.
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