🧩 BoardVerse

BoardVerse is a platform developed for the Large-Scale and Multi-Structured Databases course project (A.Y. 2024/2025).
It centralizes and explores information about modern board games, integrating data from BoardGameGeek (BGG) and BoardGameArena (BGA).

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📌 Features

• 🗂️ Games Catalog: Explore metadata of 2,000+ top-ranked board games.
• ⭐ User Reviews: Discover user-generated ratings and comments.
• 💬 Forums: Dive into community discussions with threads and messages per game.
• 🏆 Tournaments: Browse upcoming events and configurations from BGA.
• 🧠 Recommendations: Suggest friends and games using graph-based traversal.

🧱 Technologies

• MongoDB: Stores structured document data (games, reviews, users, tournaments).
• Neo4j: Manages graph data for relationships and recommendations.
• Python: Custom scripts for scraping, API integration, and dataset generation.
• Java (Spring Boot): RESTful backend exposing services for the application.

📊 Dataset Overview

• ~500 MB of processed data
• Collected from BGG (via XML API) and BGA (via scraping)
• Enhanced with realistic synthetic data where unavailable
• Covers: Games, Users, Reviews, Forums, Tournaments

🚀 Setup Instructions

1. Clone the repository

2. Set up MongoDB and Neo4j instances:

   • Ensure MongoDB is running locally or in your environment.
   • Ensure Neo4j is running and accessible for graph-based services.

3. Run backend services (/java-backend)

4. (Optional) Launch dataset generation scripts (/data-scripts)

📄 Documentation

Full instructions and API documentation are available in the /docs folder.

✨ Credits

Developed by

• Martina Fabiani
• Tommaso Falaschi
• Emanuele Respino