Board Game Librarian Wiki

How Board Game Librarian answers your questions

A plain-language guide to how the system understands questions, searches rulebooks, handles any language, and decides how confident it is in an answer.

From PDF to answer: how rulebooks become knowledge

When you ask "Can I interrupt an attack with a reaction?" the system doesn't search a PDF. It searches a compressed, enriched, vectorised representation of that PDF — one that was built the first time

Ten languages, one answer

Board Game Librarian answers rules questions in the language you ask them in. No language selector, no profile setting, no dropdown. Type in Polish, get Polish back. Type in Japanese, Japanese comes o

Beyond the rulebook: how community knowledge works

Rulebooks are written before a game ships. They describe the intended system, but they can't anticipate every ambiguous corner case, every interaction between expansion cards, or every question that e

What happens when the rulebook doesn't have the answer

Sometimes the rulebook simply doesn't answer your question. Here's how the system admits it, silently escalates to community sources, and why it never invents a ruling.

Where the rulebooks come from (and why they're in English)

Publisher syncs, direct outreach, and manual curation feed a 3,788-document library. Every document is an English edition, by design — and you can still ask in 10 languages.

How community FAQs fill the gaps in rulebooks

Some rulings exist in no PDF at all. How scattered community knowledge becomes a curated, publisher-reviewed, searchable FAQ — with Black Rose Wars as the worked example.

The question & answer pipeline

How questions flow through the two-tier pipeline -- game detection, vector search, and when I escalate to Tier 2.

How I read rulebooks

When you ask about a game for the first time, I process the rulebook on demand -- chunking, embedding, and storing it in the vector database.

How I generate answers

How I turn raw rulebook chunks into a cited answer -- prompt templates, AI synthesis, and the citation system.

I got the wrong answer — why?

How semantic search works: finding meaning, not keywords

You're mid-game and you need to know what happens when two units occupy the same hex. You type "same hex two units" into a search box. A keyword engine looks for those exact words. If the rulebook say

Inside the prompt architecture

Answering a board game rules question isn't a single model call. It's a pipeline: classify, retrieve, route, synthesise. Each stage has a specific job, and they're designed to be independent — swap an

What the system can't see: limits of PDF extraction

The system works by reading text. Rulebooks communicate through text, images, diagrams, colour, spatial layout, and visual examples. That gap between what the system reads and what a rulebook actually

System architecture

All 20 services, how they connect, and the full technology stack behind Board Game Librarian.

Vector search & embeddings

How HNSW indexing, 768-dimensional embeddings, and cosine similarity combine to find the right rulebook passages.

The RAG pipeline in detail

RAG explained step by step: query expansion, vector retrieval, context assembly, and AI synthesis.

The two-tier answer system

How auto-escalation works, what triggers Tier 2, and why most questions resolve in under 7 seconds.

10 languages, one pipeline

How I detect the question language and answer in the same language, even though rulebooks and forum threads are in English.

Autonomous quality optimisation

How the autonomous quality loop works: nightly LLM-as-judge evaluation, YAML prompt proposals, test battery validation, and safe auto-deployment of improvements.

Partner portal — complete guide

Complete guide to the Board Game Librarian Partner Portal — dashboard, widgets, team management, billing, and more.

Embedding the rules assistant on your site

The Board Game Librarian widget lets you drop a fully functional rules Q&A assistant into any page on your site. Your visitors ask questions about your games; the assistant answers using the official

Your first 5 minutes: adding the rules assistant to your site

Embeddable widget

Add a rules assistant to your site in minutes -- widget.js, iframe, or React component.

Partner portal

Games, widgets, team RBAC, analytics, audit logs, and notifications -- the partner portal explained.

Building Board Game Librarian: the story so far

These are working notes from someone who's been close to the project — not a press release.

How this started

I built Board Game Librarian because I was tired of mid-game rulebook excavations. Here is the story from Telegram bot to multi-channel system.

By the numbers

Rulebooks, services, publishers, latency numbers -- all the metrics that define the current system.

How it works

From rulebook to answer — the full pipeline explained, one layer at a time.

Technical deep dives

Architecture, vector search, RAG pipeline, the two-tier system, and multilingual support -- all explained in detail.

For publishers

How to embed the Board Game Librarian widget on your site, manage your games, and read your player analytics.

The project

Where it started, how it grew, and the numbers behind the system.