Gamefit

Why Game Fit Matters

More Game Fit. More Fun.

The same board game can flop one night and shine the next.

The difference isn't the game. It's the fit.

• Is the group looking for something cozy or chaotic?
• Is tonight the night for a 25-minute rules explanation?
• Oh… did the neighborhood 9-year-old just show up?

There have never been more amazing games to choose from. That also means it's easier than ever for great games to miss their moment.

When Game Fit improves:

• Forgotten favorites resurface more often
• Every recommendation becomes more personal
• Every purchase has a better chance of being a great fit
• Every game night has a better chance of being unforgettable

That's the future we're building.

Gamefit doesn't replace your instincts. It brings together the collective wisdom of the gaming community whenever you want a clearer picture of what fits the moment.

The future of board gaming isn't just about more great games. It's about helping more great games find their moment.

More Game Fit. More Fun.

We can't promise every game night will be perfect, but we believe more of them can be unforgettable.

That’s a future worth investing in.

Meet Gamefit

Board Game DNA

Your gaming tastes aren't fixed. They evolve over time.

Board Game DNA learns what you love today and continues learning as you play, rate, and discover new games. As your tastes change, your Board Game DNA evolves with you, keeping every recommendation fresh and personalized.

Simply rank a few games you've played to create your DNA profile. From there, you'll discover:

• Personalized game recommendations that evolve with your tastes
• Your DNA Match percentage for every game
• Games similar to your current favorites
• How your gaming preferences are changing over time
• Friends with compatible gaming tastes
• Shared DNA profiles for your game group

Instead of wondering, "Will I like this?" you'll have the data.

Magic Match

Tell us what matters in the moment, and Magic Match weighs those preferences to find the best-fitting games.

All this is powered by a huge growing vault of community insights.

The better we understand your preferences and each game intimately, the better the matching engine.

Use the power of Magic Match to find new favorites, or in your own collection for game night decisions!

Elevate Game Night

Menu Mode

With Menu Mode, you can use your tablet and set up a dedicated matching engine for your collection, gaming group, event, or store.

ChatGPT Plugin

Game Groups

Every gaming group has its own personality.

Create permanent Game Groups to see:

• Which games your group loves
• New games added to your shared collection
• Group DNA preferences
• Best games for tonight's players
• Recommendations based on everyone attending

Multi-DNA Matching

For gaming groups whose members have set up their Board Game DNA and loaded their collections, you can tap a button to see top matches for the group by weighing everyone’s Board Game DNA.

Play streaks and play tracking

Track your plays and try to play a game every week to keep your streak alive.

What People Are Saying

"This could be extremely helpful for things like conventions that could help suggest stuff for people who are newer to the hobby [...] Dang the more I look at this site the more I hope this takes off. It's very well designed and pretty easy to use."

— Intervia, The Lizard Queen (Boardgames Discord server)

Community-Powered Data

We’re launching with Game DNA profiles for more than 1,000 board games. Beyond basic facts, our community insights allow us to calculate:

• Fun Score
• Game Vibes
• How easy it is to jump into
• Simple decisions vs strategic decisions per turn
• Ideal player count
• Minimum age
• Typical setup time, teach time, and playtime

Where does the data come from?

We've been hard at work collecting board game insights from the community to power Gamefit.

You can track where community insights are coming from at any time at gamefit.com/insights. The primary sources are:

• Users and Visitors: Users contribute to our data layer when they do things like track plays or share gaming preferences. Visitors also contribute when they rank games to see their Board Game DNA.
• Research Participants: We pay users for their time when we do independent research or use research platforms such as Prolific.
• Social Media Outreach: We reach out to users on social media and ask them to fill out a 5 to 10-minute survey. As a thank you, we award a $100 board game gift card each month to a random winner. Winners can choose to receive their gift card from Miniature Market, Game Nerdz, or their Friendly Local Game Store.

The Matching Engine Difference

Today you can browse, search, filter, and sort board games at a lot of places.

At Gamefit, we believe matching is the next board game discovery innovation.

After we learn what's important to you in any given moment, we intelligently weigh multiple factors and assign match scores based on each game's DNA.

Those are fancy words and all, but does it feel different? You can use our matching engine for free at gamefit.com. See if you experience an "aha moment" like I did the first time I tried it.

Why can you trust our rankings?

In traditional rating databases, users rank games on a scale. But the same rating can mean something different to every user, and each game is judged in isolation.

Inspired by how modern chess sites track the strength of players, Gamefit uses a different approach. We rank games across a growing list of dimensions based on head-to-head comparisons.

To keep those comparisons grounded in recent experience, players are only asked about games they’ve played within the past six months.

• Is Game A or Game B more enjoyable?
• Is Game A or Game B easier to jump into?
• Does Game A or Game B have more strategic decisions per turn?
• Is Game A or Game B more relaxing?
• Is Game A or Game B more social?

Once a game has enough head-to-head enjoyment comparisons, we assign its Fun Score based on how it performs against its peers.

We repeat that process across other dimensions to build each game’s unique DNA.

Good Games Have Great Vibes

We’re on a mission to move board game discovery forward. Before expanding our community insights, we researched the experiences players most want from a game.

The result: six core vibes that players can assign to each game.

Built with Publisher Permission

Precise matching requires more than basic game facts. That’s why we’re building our own independent data layer with the board gaming community to capture how games feel, who they fit, and when they shine.

Games can appear in matches with or without publisher assets. We contact publishers directly for permission to feature official images and descriptions. Many thanks to our growing list of publishers below for trusting us to represent their games!

Publisher inclusion indicates permission to use official images and descriptions and does not necessarily imply endorsement of this campaign. Publishers can email nate@everlygames.com at any time to grant, update, or revoke permission.

Founder's Note

Hi, I'm Nate Baker!

In my wedding vows I told my wife, Colby:

"If I fall to a low place or if God allows some terror to happen, I will fight for us."

Unfortunately this statement turned out to be prophecy. Our first daughter, Everly, was born with a rare condition that caused her lungs to be underdeveloped. She died at 3 weeks old.

I wrestled with God, and when the grief didn't let up, I looked for an escape.

I found board games.

It was a world that had rules and clear outcomes. No terrors could happen there beyond what was written in the rulebook.

What began as an escape gradually became a passion.

• I binged podcasts and shows like The Secret Cabal, The Dice Tower, and Ludology.
• I spelunked through the depths of the BoardGameGeek forums and found where to buy niche wooden dexterity games like Husarengolf, Piratenbillard, and Volta.
• I climbed the CoolStuffInc customer rewards ladder, earning 3% off that sweet cardboard.
• I created maps for my tavern, town, and world in my D&D campaign. When I introduced the final boss, I triggered the music and fog machine.

I started designing board games, and as a nod to our first daughter, I named my publishing company Everly Games, the company now behind Gamefit .

Playing and designing games wasn't enough though. A decade ago I was already tinkering with creating board game tools. I created a BoardGameGeek rank tracking tool called Tabletop Tracker.

It was my capstone project when I went through a 6-month bootcamp at Nashville Software School. Shout out to Tony T at The Secret Cabal! It was an amazing honor when he discussed the project at 130:34 on episode #129.

Tinkering with board game tools stayed a side project for a while. I would mock up the user interface in Sketch at night and try to build my vision on top of existing board data layers like Amazon and BoardGameGeek, but I kept running into roadblocks.

During more than four and a half years as a data analyst at Chess.com, I watched the engineering team transform how it built software. I got a front row seat watching how AI could safely accelerate software development.

At that point, Gamefit was an idea with a few abandoned codebases in its wake. I had experience in software engineering, data analysis, and marketing, but the project wasn’t moving forward. I had vision and expertise, but no time.

Then working a couple hours a night, I started experimenting with AI-assisted development and it unlocked everything.

I built a data pipeline for community insights and had a working prototype. I started the hard work of building out my own data layer. It was what I needed if I was going to build a board game matching engine.

'Yer a wizard, Harry' played in the back of my mind as I was finally able to start putting multiple years of product planning into action.

Around that time, my family decided to move across state lines to be closer to family. Even though I worked remotely, I decided to step down from Chess.com without a firm plan. It felt like the right time and I needed a change. HR was confused why I was leaving.

My loose plan was to work on getting the house ready to sell, apply to jobs, and have some fun working on Gamefit on the side.

In between applying to jobs and doing things like lining up a kitchen renovation, Gamefit was giving me life. I kept making meaningful progress.

Publishers granted permission to use their official assets. Kickstarter offered the campaign a Projects We Love badge. Hobbyists contributed community data, and many went on to create accounts.

A month into the job hunt I asked my wife if she thought I should keep applying to jobs.

She said no.

I cried into my sushi.

So this is me seeing if Gamefit can keep getting traction and turn into something bigger. Honestly, it's already been a dream seeing how far it has come.

I can push through tedious work for Gamefit with a focus I struggle to find elsewhere. That’s how I know this mission matters deeply to me.

We're in the middle of a board gaming renaissance, but discovery hasn’t evolved with it. Casual players are often one great recommendation away from going deeper into the hobby.

Yet too many players struggle to find new games that fit them—not because they lack curiosity, but because the hobby still lacks a clear on-ramp.

Let's build one together.

Pledge Levels

Free vs Patron

Publisher Launch Partner

$1,499 · Limit 5

Help shape the future of Gamefit’s publisher program as a founding launch partner during the 2026 holiday season, from October 26 through January 26.

Supercharged placements are automatically generated for games already in Gamefit, so no additional creative assets are required. Board Game DNA signals help surface promoted games to relevant players in the Today and Discover tabs.

Sponsored placements are clearly labeled and remain separate from organic results. They do not affect rankings, match scores, or search order, and they are hidden from paid users unless those users opt in.

Your partnership includes:

• Three Supercharged games
• Targeted placement in the Today tab based on each player’s Board Game DNA
• Placement in relevant Discover results based on the player’s search criteria
• A more prominent purchase button on game detail pages
• Permanent recognition on our Founding Publisher Partners page
• A 15% share of premium banner inventory from October 26 through January 26

Premium banners appear at the top of the Today and Discover tabs on logged-in mobile web and on the desktop homepage where users begin the Discover flow. Banner assets are due October 19, 2026.

Up to 20% of eligible users are randomly held out from Supercharged placements, allowing publishers to measure incremental lift in engagement and attributed purchases.

Timeline

All dates are estimates and are subject to change.

• September 29 - October 13, 2026:
  Enjoy a short, 15-day Kickstarter campaign
   
• October 13 - October 20, 2026:
  Patron access codes are emailed within 7 days after the campaign ends
   
• October 19, 2026
  Holiday banner assets due for Publisher Launch Partners
   
• October 26, 2026 - January 26, 2027
  Publisher Launch Partner Period

Artist Credits

Spirit animals: ONYXprj
Kickstarter cover photo background: Prathan Chorruangsak