How we create our reviews

The review pulls together what we can verify about a game: what it is and how it actually plays (from the official rulebook), how hard it is to learn and teach, the player-count truth — what the box claims versus what thousands of BoardGameGeek voters say it plays best at — components, replayability where sources support it, and honest limitations. It's built from the documented record around a game, not an invented anecdote of a game night that never happened.

Drafts are AI-assisted and source-grounded. For every page we retrieve verified information — the publisher's own rulebook PDF where they make one available, the game's Amazon listing data, BoardGameGeek community statistics, and reputable published coverage — and the writing is built from that, not from guesswork. Rules claims cite the rulebook by page number. Every factual claim has to trace back to a real, retrieved source, and each review lists its sources at the bottom of the page. When no rulebook is available we say so rather than pretend — rules detail then comes attributed from published coverage or gets cut. Retailer pages tell us availability, never quality. We never cite prices in the review text — they change too fast to trust.

We deliberately don't assign our own star rating. We haven't played every game at every count, so a number out of five would imply a judgment we didn't earn. What we show instead are real, attributed figures: the Amazon player aggregate, and BoardGameGeek's community rating, complexity weight, and player-count poll — always labelled as the community's, never as ours, with a link back to BGG. Our own contribution is qualitative: who a game suits, what it demands of the table, and when to skip it. We try to be honest about weaknesses as well as strengths.

LuvemGames is an independent site, built and maintained by one developer who stands behind its editorial standards: accuracy, honest sourcing, and never claiming first-hand experience we don't have. We publish under the LuvemGames editorial name rather than inventing a fictional reviewer with a made-up credential. For lived experience at the table, real player reviews and the BoardGameGeek forums are irreplaceable — and we link straight to them.

Some links on our pages are affiliate links (mainly Amazon): if you buy through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes our assessment of a game. See our full affiliate disclosure for details.

We get things wrong sometimes, and we'd rather know. If a page has a factual error, a broken source, or a recommendation that doesn't add up, tell us via our contact details and we'll correct it.