Inner Circle Seoul
A website for a board game café in Seoul, built for an owner who does not write code and should never have to.
BoardGameGeek is the CMS: a twice-daily pipeline turns the café’s GeekList into a fully static site, with no backend.
The CMS is BoardGameGeek. The site reads the café’s existing BGG GeekList rather than any admin panel. Each game carries a tag in a comment the owner already maintains — lang:ko,ja — and the rest comes from BGG. Adding a game to the shelf and to the site are one action.
A build-time pipeline instead of a backend. A GitHub Actions job runs twice a day: it calls the BGG XML API, retries the 202 “queued, come back” responses, validates tags, generates thumbnails, and commits a deterministic games.json. No backend, no database, no runtime call — a BGG outage cannot take the site down.
Failures are surfaced, never destructive. A mistyped tag like lang:kr, or none at all, never drops a game from the shelf; the problem goes to a human-readable fetch-report.md instead. Whoever maintains the data is not whoever wrote the code.
A game catalog with search, weight banding, four sort keys, and a “playable in” filter for Korean or English — whether a group can play depends on the language printed on the cards. The recommender filters by player count and mood.