This is no longer working thanks to Discord forcing everyone into their ridiculous slash command system, and no longer supported because I don’t have the time. RIP, bot. You were good for a while.
You might be aware of our WordPress Plugin – it’s been gradually sinking itself deeper into the internals of this site over the past month or so. It’s so deep now that doctors are afraid that the site would die if we removed it. Well, since I wrote up a backend API and a pile of other things to support that plugin I decided today ‘Hey, why not give a Discord bot a go?’. So I did. And now one exists. Life comes at you fast.
If you want to add it to a Discord server you run, all you have to do is go here: https://discordapp.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=445020579410739201&scope=bot
I think…
It’s a simple little creature that will take three commands. The first of these is !bgg and that’s used to get game details from our API, which will in turn get the game details from BGG. You can give it a BGG Id, or the exact name of a game, or a general search string. It’ll do its best to turn that into actual information for you. The instruction ‘!bgg concordia’ for example will get you the following output:
Searching for an imprecise string, such as ‘!bgg gloomh’ will give you the first entry from the search results of BGG’s search API. It’s… not perfect. I might improve the quality of this as time goes by – it depends on how many people use the bot really.
You can also do ‘!mlu’ as a command to get an accessibility scorecard if we have one. For example, ‘!mlu catan’ will get you the accessibility scorecard for Catan.
Finally, if you forget any of this you can always ask for !instructions:
As is the case with the WordPress plugin, I’ll prioritise feature requests from Patrons so if you think you might want to make heavy use of this now might be a good time to hop on board!
Update (23/6/2021):
1) Stability is much improved of late since I moved it to a different set of libraries.
2) I added a new feature… !bgghot will now give you the top ten games on the Hotness list.
3) !bsearch will now let you search for games
4) !bfind will do an exact match search so you can now disambiguate between different games with the same name.
Hopefully 2, 3, and 4 will not interfere with 1 but I will keep an eye on it.