Boardroom

A private site for a board game group that plays together regularly. It keeps the group's play history, what everyone thinks of each game, and a shared shelf built from everyone's BoardGameGeek collections. It also plans each game night: who's coming, what to play, and what to read or watch beforehand. Events and plays go to and from the group's Discord, and if you turn it on, Claude can suggest what to play or buy next. Each group runs its own copy, on free tiers of Vercel and Turso.

Try the demo, with a made-up group you can sign in as. Play around: it all resets every night.

Next.js 16 · React 19 · TypeScript · Tailwind 4 · Drizzle + SQLite (Turso) · Better Auth (Discord sign-in) · Claude API

What it does

• Getting set up. Your first sign-in lands on one page with every step on it: check the name the group sees, find yourself in past plays, rate and rank the games you've played, and add your BGG collection and Board Game Arena name. Until you're set up, Home shows how far along you are.
• Play log, kept in step with Discord. Tap each game on the event's page as it's played, so everyone at the table sees the night's log fill in, or log it on the Plays page. The night's games go up as one post in the group's channel, linked to the event's thread, with a copy in the thread. The morning after, whoever made the event gets a DM if nothing's been logged yet. Plays people write in Discord by hand are imported too, back to the channel's first message.
• Ratings and rankings. Rate games with a tap, and rank the ones you've played with quick "this or that?" questions. Heavy and light games are ranked separately, so a party game never has to beat a long strategy game. The group's favorites come from everyone's lists.
• Events in Discord. Make an event on the site or with /event new, and it's posted to the events channel with its own thread. People answer Going, Maybe or Can't make it with the post's buttons or on the site, and can answer for someone else, even someone who isn't in Discord yet. Changing the event in either place updates the post and tells the thread. A few hours before it starts, a reply on the post pings whoever's going or a maybe.
• Finding a date. Offer a few dates on Plan or with /event poll, and the event's made right away with its date TBD: its own page, post and thread, which it keeps once the date's set. Everyone says Works, If I have to or Can't for each date (in Discord, Works for me or the My answers panel), and dates they leave count as can't. It shows who's answered and which date's best, pings whoever started it once everyone has, and again on the day to decide by if they gave one. Set the date lists them best first, and everyone's down as they answered. If the date falls through, Date fell through puts the event back to picking one, with every answer and game kept. With a casual night on, it can be for either kind of night.
• Planning a night. Start from who's coming and get the shelf scored for that table: what they love, what they want to play, what hasn't been played in a while, and what suits the player count. Propose games, vote, lock one in, and the rules and teach videos are linked for prep.
• Discover. Games nobody owns, scored against everyone's taste with a calibrated "chance you'd like it", plus, with Claude on, its picks for the group or just for you.
• A casual night too, if you have one. A second, lighter night with guests, with its own channels and recommendations. Instead of voting on a game, people say what they're bringing, or ask whoever owns a game to bring it, and the bot DMs them to answer. When a casual regular wants in on the core group's nights, any member can invite them from People or from Discord's right-click menu.
• Online. Which of your games are on Board Game Arena, and who's up for playing them there.

docs/how-it-works.md covers all of it in detail, and the site's own How it works page explains every number to members.

What you need

Discord	A server for the group, and a Discord application you create, for sign-in and a bot	Free
Vercel	Hosting and the nightly sync. The Hobby plan is enough	Free
Turso	The database	Free tier
BoardGameGeek API token	Optional: syncs collections automatically. Approval takes a week or more, so ask for one first. Until then, collections can be uploaded as a CSV export	Free, non-commercial use
Anthropic API key	Optional, for Claude's picks and reading hand-written play posts that don't follow the template	Pay as you go

Set it up

1. Ask BoardGameGeek for an API token

Register an application at https://boardgamegeek.com/applications (non-commercial). Once it's approved, create a token there: that's BGG_API_TOKEN. Carry on with the rest while you wait; you can add the token later.

2. Create the Discord application

Follow docs/discord-setup.md. You create the application yourself; the server owner only clicks an invite link to add the bot (docs/server-owner.md is written for them).

3. Create the database

turso db create boardroom
turso db show boardroom --url          # → DATABASE_URL
turso db tokens create boardroom       # → DATABASE_AUTH_TOKEN

The tables are created on the first deploy: every production build applies any new migrations before it builds.

4. Deploy

The button copies this repo into your GitHub account and asks for the variables below. Or fork the repo and import it at https://vercel.com/new, which makes pulling in updates a click (see Updating).

Environment variables

Variable
BETTER_AUTH_SECRET, CRON_SECRET	Random secrets: openssl rand -base64 32 for each
DATABASE_URL, DATABASE_AUTH_TOKEN	From step 3
DISCORD_CLIENT_ID, DISCORD_CLIENT_SECRET, DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN	From step 2
DISCORD_GUILD_ID	The group's server
BGG_API_TOKEN	Optional: from step 1
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	Optional: lets an admin turn Claude on in Group settings. Create it in a workspace of its own with a monthly spend limit, and mark it Sensitive in Vercel
DISCORD_PUBLIC_KEY	Optional: turns on the buttons on nights' posts and the /event command (see Nights in Discord)
DISCORD_COMMAND_NAME	Optional: the slash command's name instead of event (/event new, poll, edit, cancel). Run pnpm discord:commands again after changing it
BETTER_AUTH_URL	The site's address. On Vercel it defaults to the project's production domain, so set it only for a custom domain or another host
DEMO	Optional: on makes the site a public demo on a made-up group (see The demo). Its nightly cron wipes the database, so give it one of its own. Ignored with DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN or DISCORD_GUILD_ID set

.env.example lists them all with notes. Once it's deployed, add https://<your-domain>/api/auth/callback/discord to the Discord application's OAuth2 redirects.

5. Sign in and set up the group

Sign in with Discord and open Settings → Group settings. Until someone's an admin, every member can change these, so start by making yourself one at the bottom of the page. Then choose:

Setting	Default
Site name	Boardroom	Page titles, the header, and the button on posts in Discord
Time zone	UTC	Play dates and night times use it
What your events are called	Game night	What the group's own nights are called everywhere on the site
New events' title	{date} and the night's name	What a new night is called unless someone names it. {date} is its date ("10/29/26"), {game} the game locked in for it or TBD: {date} Game Night — {game} makes "10/29/26 Game Night — TBD", then "10/29/26 Game Night — Root" once Root is locked in. Its thread has the same name
Fewest to set a date	2, or 3 for a casual night	Picking a date, how many need to be able to come for a date to be worth setting. A date with fewer shows as too few
Reminder	3	How many hours before a night starts its post gets a reply pinging whoever's going or a maybe. 0 turns it off. Needs the tick
A casual night too	off	A second, casual night with its own name, title and channels (see Core and casual nights)
Heavy from BGG weight	2.75	Where the two rankings, Heavy games and Light games, split. Set it to the weight your group's heavier games start at
Use Claude	off	Claude's picks and reading hand-written play posts the parser can't. Shown once ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is set. Off, the site never calls Claude or mentions it
Picks a day	5	Claude's picks each person can ask for in a day
Member role	none	Only people with this Discord role can sign in (see Who can sign in)
Plays channel	none	Where plays logged on the site are posted, and where hand-written ones are read from. One for each kind of night

The Discord settings pick from the server's channels and roles, so they only show once the bot is in the server. Admins can make other members admins on the same page. A change shows across the site straight away, with no redeploy.

6. Import the history

Tap Sync from Discord on the Plays page to import the channel's history. For a long history, run the same sync from your machine instead, where there's no serverless time limit. It picks up where it left off:

pnpm install
pnpm sync .env.production     # a file with the production variables (gitignored)

After that, a nightly cron (vercel.json, 09:00 UTC) syncs Discord, BGG collections and Board Game Arena.

Reminders and the morning after

With nights posted in Discord (Part 4), Boardroom replies to a night's post a few hours before it starts, pinging whoever's going or a maybe and reminding anyone bringing games to bring them. The morning after, it DMs whoever made the night if nothing's been logged for it. The same tick says so on the post of an event picking a date once every date on offer has gone by, and pings whoever started one on the day they said to decide by. Vercel's Hobby crons only run once a day, so something else has to call /api/cron/tick every few minutes through the day. A free scheduler like cron-job.org does it on time: make a job that sends a GET to https://<your-domain>/api/cron/tick every 5 minutes, with the header Authorization: Bearer <CRON_SECRET> (the same value as in Vercel), and use its test run to check it gets a 200.

The repo also has a GitHub Actions workflow that calls the tick (.github/workflows/tick.yml). It's scheduled every 15 minutes once you add two repository secrets:

gh secret set SITE_URL      # https://<your-domain>
gh secret set CRON_SECRET   # the same value as in Vercel

GitHub runs scheduled workflows when it has room, though, often hours apart, so on its own it can miss a night's reminder. Keep it as a backup: a night is only reminded once, however many schedulers call the tick. It's free for a public repo or fork. On a private repo each run counts against GitHub's free Actions minutes, so run it hourly there (change "2-59/15 * * * *" to "7 * * * *"). GitHub turns off scheduled workflows in a repo with no activity for 60 days, and in a new fork until you open its Actions tab.

Updating

Pull this repo's changes into your copy and Vercel redeploys it, applying any new migrations first. With a fork, that's GitHub's Sync fork button. With a copy from the Deploy button:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/wtwerner/boardroom.git   # once
git pull upstream main && git push

Posts already up in Discord take on a new look the next time their night changes. To update them all at once, run node scripts/with-env.mjs .env.production pnpm refresh:posts.

Deploying from GitHub Actions instead

Vercel's GitHub app, which deploys a connected repo, also writes to it: a status on each commit, and it can set your site's address as the repo's website. To keep a public repo free of that, disconnect the project from the repo (in Vercel, Settings → Git → Disconnect) and let .github/workflows/deploy.yml deploy it once ci passes on main. Vercel still builds it, so the build log and settings stay there, and the workflow's log only says whether it worked.

vercel link                                                       # once, to make .vercel/project.json
gh secret set VERCEL_TOKEN        # a token from vercel.com/account/tokens, scoped to the project's team
gh secret set VERCEL_ORG_ID       # "orgId" in .vercel/project.json
gh secret set VERCEL_PROJECT_ID   # "projectId" in .vercel/project.json

Without the three secrets the workflow does nothing, so a project that stays connected deploys the usual way.

Developing

With Node 24 (what CI runs) and pnpm:

pnpm install
cp .env.example .env.local
pnpm db:migrate
pnpm seed:dev     # a fake group (Sam, Alex, Jordan, Casey) with about 40 plays
pnpm dev

Without Discord credentials, the sign-in page has Sign in as… buttons for the seeded members. Sam is the seeded group's admin, for Group settings. Turn on A casual night too there (or add CASUAL_NIGHT=on to .env.local before seeding) to see the casual night's side of the site, and run pnpm seed:dev again to give it plays and an event. Before opening a pull request, run pnpm typecheck && pnpm test && pnpm lint, the same checks CI runs. CONTRIBUTING.md has the rest: testing against a Discord server of your own, where code goes, and migrations.

License

MIT. The symbols on Discord posts (assets/discord-emoji) are Font Awesome Free icons, under CC BY 4.0. The meeple is Tabler Icons' meeple-filled, under MIT. Game data comes from BoardGameGeek under its API terms, which allow non-commercial use only: run Boardroom for your group, not as a paid service.