Help & FAQ

GamesBond is a board game community platform with a spy/007 theme. Think of it as your agency headquarters for everything board games: discovering new titles, reading and writing reviews, learning strategies, tracking your collection, logging plays, finding game nights, and connecting with fellow agents.

The platform is built around the idea that every board gamer is an agent, and the board game hobby is a world of missions, dossiers, and tactical decisions. This theme runs through the entire experience, from how we name features to how the gamification system works.

Key features of the platform:

• Dossier Database -- a comprehensive game catalog sourced from BoardGameGeek
• Mission Briefings -- in-depth game reviews with a 1-5 martini glass rating
• Field Tactics & Agent Training -- strategy guides and how-to-play guides
• The Armory -- your personal game collection tracker
• Field Reports -- play session logging
• Rendezvous -- game night events and venue discovery
• Price Watch -- deal tracking with price drop alerts
• Cardboard -- an AI-powered board game prototyping tool

Mission Briefings are our take on game reviews. Any registered agent can write a review for any game in the Dossier Database. Reviews use a 1-5 martini glass rating scale:

Reviews include a text body where you can go in-depth on what you liked, what fell flat, and who the game is best suited for. Writing reviews earns you 100 XP toward your Analyst skill.

GamesBond has two types of guides, each serving a different purpose:

The Dossier Database is our game catalog -- a comprehensive directory of board games sourced primarily from BoardGameGeek (BGG). Each game dossier includes:

• Player count, play time, and weight/complexity
• Taxonomy: categories, mechanics, themes, designers, publishers
• Cover art and description
• Affiliate buy links with price tracking (Price Watch)
• Links to reviews, guides, and training for that game
• Community ratings from BGG

You can browse games by category, mechanic, designer, publisher, or theme. The Mission Planner recommender helps you find games that match your group size, time, experience level, and mood.

Every action you take on GamesBond earns experience points (XP) that level up your agent profile. The system tracks four independent skill trees:

As you accumulate XP, you progress through ranks: Recruit, Agent, and Double-0. Check the Leaderboard to see how you rank against other agents by total XP or per-skill XP.

Rendezvous are game night events that agents can create and discover. Any registered agent can organize a Rendezvous, specifying the date, location, games planned, and player slots. Other agents can RSVP to join.

Events support proximity-based discovery -- you can find game nights happening near you using location search. The Safe Houses directory lists board game cafes, stores, and other venues where game nights regularly happen.

The Weekly Briefing is the GamesBond newsletter. It delivers a curated roundup of new reviews, guides, game recommendations, price drops, and community activity straight to your inbox.

The newsletter uses a dynamic shortcode system, so each issue can embed live game cards with cover art and buy links, guide previews, deal summaries, and more -- not just static text.

Subscribe from the footer of any page on the site. You can unsubscribe at any time via the link in every email.

Cardboard is an AI-powered board game prototyping tool built into the GamesBond platform. It lets you design, playtest, and export board game prototypes entirely in the browser -- no physical materials needed to validate your ideas.

The core workflow is: describe your game idea to the AI designer, iterate on the rules and components through conversation, playtest it in real-time with other players or AI opponents, then export your finished prototype to external tools or print-and-play formats.

The AI designer is a conversational interface powered by Claude. You describe your game idea in natural language, and the AI helps you turn it into a structured game definition that the engine can run.

A typical design session looks like this:

1. Describe your concept: "I want a card game about trading spices in a medieval market"
2. The AI generates an initial game definition with components, zones, actions, and win conditions
3. You refine through conversation: "Add a bluffing mechanic" or "Make the market deck smaller"
4. Each change updates the structured definition in real time
5. When ready, hit playtest to try it out immediately

The AI understands board game design patterns -- mechanics like deck building, worker placement, area control, and more. It can suggest balancing adjustments and flag potential issues in your design.

A game definition is the structured data model that describes your board game prototype. It's what the game engine reads to know what the game is and how it works. A definition contains:

Each action has conditions (when can you do it?) and effects (what happens?). Conditions can check resources, zone contents, game phase, and more. Effects can move components, modify resources, change turn order, and trigger other events.

A Game Knowledge Document (GKD) is an AI-optimized representation of a game's rules and mechanics. While a game definition is the machine-readable structure the engine uses, a GKD is designed for AI consumption -- giving Claude the context it needs to understand a game deeply.

GKDs are used in two main ways: on the community site, they power the AI Q&A feature that can answer questions about any game in the Dossier Database. In Cardboard, they provide the rules context that the game engine and AI adjudicator need to run playtests correctly.

GKDs are generated automatically from game definitions or from external data (like BGG descriptions) using Claude, then stored as structured JSONB in the database.

The Cardboard game engine is an Elixir GenServer that manages active game sessions. It operates on a dual-layer approach:

This means you can prototype games with incomplete rule definitions. The engine handles what it can, and the AI fills in the gaps. As you refine your design, more and more situations get handled by the fast deterministic layer.

The game definition system supports a wide range of mechanics through its composable action/condition/effect model:

Triggers can fire once, once per turn, or every time their event occurs. They respond to events like turn_start, turn_end, action completion, resource changes, and zone modifications.

Cardboard supports real-time multiplayer playtesting directly in the browser:

• Start a playtest session from any prototype you own and share the invite link with other players
• AI opponents can fill empty seats -- they use the game's GKD to make decisions according to the rules
• The game engine manages state in real time via Phoenix LiveView -- no page reloads or polling
• After each session, a playtest report summarizes what happened: turns taken, resources spent, who won, and flagged rule ambiguities

The matchmaking system lets you find other playtesters on the platform. You can create a listing describing your prototype and what kind of feedback you're looking for, and other designers can sign up to playtest with you.

Once your prototype is ready, you can export it in several formats:

The PDF export generates a complete rulebook (auto-generated from your game definition) plus print-and-play component sheets laid out for standard paper sizes.

The shortcode system enables dynamic content embedding in newsletter issues. Instead of static text, editors can insert live-rendered cards and widgets using a simple syntax:

Shortcodes are expanded at render time, so the data is always current when the email is sent. Unknown shortcodes are left as plain text.

Cardboard prototyping offers four plan tiers. The GamesBond community site (reviews, guides, events, etc.) is free for everyone -- plans only apply to the Cardboard prototyping tool.

All plans include full access to exports, matchmaking, and version history. The primary differentiator is the monthly AI message allocation, which covers design chat, AI opponents, and GKD generation.

View full pricing details →

AI messages are counted per calendar month and reset on the 1st. Every interaction with Claude counts as one message, including:

• Design chat messages (asking the AI to modify your game)
• AI opponent moves during playtests
• GKD generation for existing games
• AI adjudication calls during engine fallback

You can track your current usage from the Usage page in the Cardboard dashboard. If you hit your limit, you can upgrade your plan at any time -- the new allocation takes effect immediately.

Tip: once your game definition is well-specified, most playtest actions are handled by the deterministic engine without using AI messages. The AI is mainly used during the early design phase and for edge cases.