Board Game Stats Cloud sync

Cloud sync automatically syncs your Plays, Players, Games and Locations between your devices seamlessly. It also provides you with a backup of your data in the cloud. It does not currently sync photos. Cloud sync is a $0.99 per year in-app subscription. One subscription is valid for all your devices.

To be clear: if you just want to post your plays to BGG, you don’t need the Cloud sync subscription.

Why not just sync via BoardGameGeek? For most data you can, although BG Stats can’t automatically see what’s changed in your data on BGG like it can with cloud data. More importantly, in Board Game Stats you can keep track of more details than BGG can save, so this data needs another way to be transferred and backuped. Details not on BGG are: board/variant used in a play, calculation of the scores, start player, rank, team name, game’s scoring settings, full players and location names (when anonymizing these to BGG), game notes. Lastly, all data on BGG is public, cloud sync is private.

What is synced?

Synced is:

  • All Player data, including the image you’ve added to a player.
  • All Location data.
  • All Game data, excluding images you’ve added by yourself, but including the link to the correct BGG image.
  • All Play data, scores, etc., excluding images, but including e.g. the post to BGG status.
  • Challenges

So not synced is:

  • Play images. This is due to the storage requirements this would have.
  • Game images you’ve added yourself. This might change in the future.
  • Settings in the app, like your BGG settings, how to display pie charts, sorting options, etc.

Deleted items are saved in your Cloud account. If necessary they can be undeleted on request. Cloud sync does not provide a way to ‘go back in time’ to a certain point.

How much does it cost and what are the conditions?

Cloud sync can be tried for free for a period of two weeks. After that period, you can extend the subscription for a year with a small in-app purchase. It’s also possible to extend the subscription as often as you like.

With one subscription you can sync between as many devices as you’d like. It does not matter which iCloud or Google Play account you’re using on each of those devices, which means you can sync with your spouse’s device as well. Note however, that all synced devices must use the same BGG account, because otherwise plays would get mixed up or duplicated.

By enabling Cloud sync you agree to the following conditions:

  • We can in no way be held responsible in the event of loss of data.
  • Aggregated data can be used to display general stats about played games by all users.*
  • Our Privacy policy and Terms of Service.

Your data is handled securely and with the utmost care. No personal details (including your email address) are ever shared with third parties. The email address you enter is solely intended as identification of your account and to send you authorization codes to authorize new devices.

Even when your account expires you will be able to authorize to it and download your existing data. You just wont be able to update or add data while the account is expired.

How does it work?

You can enable cloud-sync from the Settings (tap the gear icon on the Overview tab) under ‘Cloud sync settings’. After enabling, you have to create your cloud-sync account by tapping ‘Create account…’. After entering your email address for authorization purposes, a first full sync of your existing data will take place.

If you want to authorize a second device, you can do so by tapping ‘Authorize existing account…’ on that second device. After entering the email address you used previously, an email will be sent to that address with a passcode. After receiving the passcode, tap ‘Enter passcode for authorization…’ to enter it, and start a first full sync. A passcode expires after 24 hours, after which you’ll have to request a new one.

Please note that if you have imported a copy of your data earlier, and haven’t updated that import for a while, it might be best to delete your copy of BG Stats and reinstall a fresh, empty copy before authorizing an existing cloud sync account. Old imported Games, Locations or Players might not be recognizable by the cloud sync, and you may end up with duplicates otherwise.

First full sync: after creating or authorizing an account, all your data in the app is sent to the cloud and synced and merged with any existing data in the cloud. If you have a lot of plays, this can take a while. A dialog will appear during the sync of Players, Games and Locations. After that, syncing of Plays will continue in the background. Progress of the sync is displayed in the titlebar of each screen. You can close the app and continue doing other things. Sync will try to continue in the background, or resume when you reopen te app.

Merging existing data: if you authorize a device with existing data that was not recently imported from another copy of BG Stats, you’ll get a warning if you want to merge the data. If you do, the cloud sync will try to match your existing Games on name or BGG ID, and Players and Locarions on name. This can result in duplicates, if names aren’t an exact match, or combine data if you used the same name twice. To prevent any merging of data, delete BG Stats first from your second device, reinstall for free from the App Store, and then authorize the cloud sync account.

Syncing with cloud: When the first full sync is done, each time you save anything in the app, it is immediately sent to the cloud. You can refresh data from the cloud in most lists by dragging the list down until a progress spinner appears. Also, if you open the app and the last sync is more than a minute ago, it will check for changes immediately. The cloud-sync does not use push messages to update information proactively, and the app therefor uses no data in the background when inactive.

Editing changed items: If you start editing something that has been changed in the cloud since, the app will ask you what to do. If you choose to continue editing, any changes you save after that, will overwrite the version in the cloud. If you choose to cancel, the item you wanted to edit will be updated from the cloud, and you can then start editing this new version.

Resolving conflicts: If you edit the same item on two devices before changes are sent to the cloud, a conflict may occur. These conflicts are resolved automatically. In each case, the last modified item will be kept, including all the data in that item. There is no comparison on a per-field basis, the item as a whole is kept or overwritten.

Enabling and disabling cloud-sync

You can enable and disable cloud-sync at any time. If you re-enable cloud sync, the first sync that takes place will send and receive all changes. This is the preferred method of temporarily preventing Board Game Stats from accessing the cloud.

You can als de-authorize a device, with the corresponding button on the Cloud sync settings screen. Doing so breaks the link between the device and the cloud version. Your device will keep all information, but will no longer sync. If you then create a new account, or authorize with the previous or another account, a new first full sync will take place.

* You can send an email to our support address to request your data is excluded from aggregated stats. You can find the address in Settings > Help, About and Contact. Please mention the email of the Cloud sync account you want excluded.