Recommend.Games

The hiatus is over! Already since April 2023 the recommendation engine at Recommend.Games has been back online, albeit with reduced functionality. In order to cut down serving costs, I made the recommendation model much more lightweight (this deserves its own article) and removed rarely used features as well as a bunch of bloat from the database.

Most of the database was filled with users’ collection items, i.e., games they rated, owned, have played etc. So all this information had to go. As a consequence, the recommendations would be cluttered with all those games the user is already familiar with, making them much less useful. That’s the reason we didn’t make a big announcement when we came back online in April.

Update: The hiatus is over! Recommend.Games is back, albeit with some reduced functionality.

The very first commit to the project ludoj¹, as I called it back then, was on December 5th, 2016. I registered the domain Recommend.Games on November 22nd, 2018. On May 15th, 2020, I published the first post on this blog. Over the years, this site attracted more than 50,000 users, which is a huge number, if you think about it.

Today, I’d like to inform you that the board game recommendation engine at Recommend.Games will take a hiatus from mid August 2022.