Board Game Popularity Race

A Python data visualization project that explores how board game popularity and rankings change over time using historical BoardGameGeek ranking data.

The project includes two visualizations:

• an animated bar chart race based on the number of users who rated each game
• a rank-based animation showing how top-ranked board games move over time

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Overview

This project processes historical BoardGameGeek ranking snapshots and converts them into monthly time-series visualizations.

The pipeline uses stable BoardGameGeek game IDs to track games over time, then converts the data into formats suitable for animation.

This project focuses on:

• data cleaning
• time-series preparation
• pandas reshaping
• handling missing values
• animated data visualization

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Features

• Monthly sampling from historical CSV snapshots
• Stable game tracking using BoardGameGeek game IDs
• Dynamic top-N game selection across the full timeline
• Animated race based on Users rated
• Rank timeline JSON export
• Rank-based animation using actual rank positions
• MP4 export with FFmpeg

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Dataset

This project uses historical BoardGameGeek ranking snapshots from the bgg-ranking-historicals dataset.

Dataset repository: bgg-ranking-historicals

The raw dataset is not included in this repository because it is large. It should be downloaded separately and placed inside:

data/raw/

Expected local structure:

data/
└── raw/
    └── bgg-ranking-historicals-master/
        ├── 2016-10-12T00-30-40.csv
        ├── 2016-10-14T00-31-11.csv
        └── ...

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Project Structure

board-game-popularity-race-project/

├── data/
│   └── raw/                         # Raw dataset files ignored by Git

├── outputs/
│   ├── data/                        # Processed JSON files
│   └── videos/                      # Generated videos ignored by Git

├── src/
│   ├── create_users_rated_race.py   # Creates the users-rated bar chart race
│   ├── create_rank_timeline_json.py # Exports cleaned rank timeline JSON
│   └── create_rank_animation.py     # Creates rank-based animation from JSON

├── requirements.txt
├── .gitignore
└── README.md

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Installation

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/Fatemeh-ameri/board-game-popularity-race-project.git
cd board-game-popularity-race-project

Create and activate a virtual environment:

macOS / Linux

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Windows

python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate

Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

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FFmpeg Requirement

This project uses FFmpeg to export MP4 animations.

macOS with Homebrew

brew install ffmpeg

Verify the installation:

ffmpeg -version

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How to Run

Run scripts from the src directory.

1. Create the users-rated race

cd src
python create_users_rated_race.py

This creates an MP4 animation based on the number of users who rated each game.

2. Create the rank timeline JSON

python create_rank_timeline_json.py

This creates:

outputs/data/boardgame_rank_timeline_top10.json

3. Create the rank-based animation

python create_rank_animation.py

This creates an MP4 animation based on actual BoardGameGeek rank positions.

Generated videos are saved inside:

outputs/videos/

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Notes on Interpretation

The users-rated animation shows how many BoardGameGeek users rated each game over time. It reflects popularity by number of ratings, not necessarily game quality or rank.

The rank-based animation uses BoardGameGeek ranks. Lower rank numbers are better, and Rank 1 appears at the top.

A game appears in the rank animation when it enters the selected Top N timeline. Missing games are not assigned fake ranks in the exported JSON.