Log: Game Shelf - What's New

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September 9, 2026 BETA 2.0

• A month on from 1.1, enough has changed under the hood that it's time to call this **Beta 2.0**!
• Box art is ours now. Every edition's box image is stored here and served at a small size, rather than being pulled from BGG at full size and shrunk to fit a shelf. A full shelf was pulling 100-180 KB *per* box before this.

September 8, 2026

• The Shelfter's width is yours to set. Grab the seam between the rail and your shelves and drag. It remembers where you put it, and a double-click puts it back to the default.
• Moving a game redraws the shelf right where it stands. No page reload, no jump back to the top, no hunting for where you were. The stage, the tray, the pager, and the Undo link all just update.
• Pull a box out from under a stack, and the stack stays standing. Whatever was resting on it follows gravity and settles down onto whatever is left, or onto the shelf.

September 7, 2026

• The Shelfter can hunt for boxes near a size. Pick up a box and find others about that size, or type three sides yourself. I like to store similarly sized games together. Also handy when you're looking for a box with particular dimensions to fit a space.
• Type in the shelf's Find box and matches drop down as you go.
• Set a box down on a wider one, and it stays where you let go along it. Two boxes can now share the top of a big one. Same rule for a box lying across the shelf.

September 6, 2026

• Pre-orders come to the shelf. If BoardGameGeek says you've pre-ordered it, the box shows up faint with the space reserved, and the hover says "Pre-ordered, space reserved". The Shelfter gets a Pre-orders chip so you can pull them all up at once. The faces fade, never the box itself, so you can still see what's coming.
• A box lands face-out when you drop it, and the first press of the turn handle stands it spine-out with the cover facing right. That's the way most people shelve, so it's the way it starts.
• Small boxes get smaller, lighter type on their plate, and the smallest lose the size from the hover altogether. A Mint Tin was wearing a headline.
• The box handles sit a hair off the face instead of sinking into it.
• "Over by" waits until a run is more than an inch and a half over its shelf before it says anything.
• A cover dragged out of the Shelfter is redrawn correctly by the server, rather than being left as the flat card the tray was showing.
• A collection sync shows a turning glyph and says it's pulling your games from BoardGameGeek, rather than sitting there looking broken.
• A new storage unit is the one you land on after you make it.
• Typing "and" also searches for "&", and vice versa, wherever a game name is searched.

September 5, 2026

• Shelf pile work.

September 4, 2026

• You can add multiple copies of the game and name them how you like, as well as give them custom box dimensions.
• Trying to get box titles to face right-side up. (If you do see them upside-down, refreshing works for me...)

September 3, 2026

• A **big box** is finally its own item on the shelf. You fill it with whatever you actually keep in there.
• Declare a big box by picking one of your own accessories.

September 2, 2026

• Layer by Layer - a new game page that shows you all the information you have about the game and, trying to keep the theme of the site, shows it in different layers. You can show/hide different layers and reorder them. Your choices apply to every game's Layer by Layer page.

August 30, 2026

• Came back from a 9-day vacation to learn that the 3D shelves were broken! So spent a day on shelf work logic.

August 21, 2026

• Upload your BGG Notes to pull in the info you added, like Game Price, Date, Store, Location, Private Notes, and more.https://layerup.games/GameShelf/Import

August 20, 2026

• Put a box under another one in a pile, even in a cube with no room to spare.
• Sleeve Stash started.

August 19, 2026

• Work on shelf logic.

August 18, 2026

• View your whole room at once! You now have a read-only view of your room, with all the shelves arranged in the order you keep them. You can drag your storage units and rooms around in any order you like, but you still must go through each storage unit individually to edit.
• A sizer for the whole room, and the tab tells you which room you're in.
• A row of shelf cubes in one press, instead of adding them one at a time.
• You can share your shelves with the public, and showcase one storage unit on your main Maker profile page.

August 15, 2026

• You can add a game directly through Shelfter; it doesn't have to come from your BGG Sync.

August 14, 2026

• Your BGG export now grabs your game's version and uses that edition's box dimensions.
• You can hide the Shelfter to free up more room to work on your shelves.
• Custom box size option added.

August 13, 2026 BETA 1.1

• Un-homed finally has a name! The Shelfter. Give your games their forever home.
• Feel confident enough to say this is the next stage of the Beta page - 1.1!
• You can add Personal Notes for a game in both the Shelf and My Games locations. Coming soon, you can import your BGG Private Comments for the game, and they'll be appended here.
• On a model page, a Shelved Game has a Storage Location description with a link that takes you directly to the exact shelf and highlights it.
• Anyone can add a big box. New declarations reach other members' shelves once an admin marks them as Official. (Needs testing yet.)
• Batch up a bunch of games from the Un-homed Rail, and send them all to one of your Rooms. Throw them all down on the floor; organize later.
• The box panel names what you printed: insert, photo caddy insert, or replacement box, for the game standing in the box. Also, of course, it shows everything you stored in that box: expansions, promos, coins, deluxe tokens, mats, etc...

August 12, 2026

• Rooms. A game can belong to a room before it has a shelf, and the wall is arranged room by room.
• The BGG import: more info on your Inventory and Private Comments that isn't covered via API. (Not live yet)
• The whole family in one box: a game, its expansions, and its accessories fold in together.
• Added top of the shelf as a valid spot to store games!

August 11, 2026: BETA 1.0, the launch

• Game Shelf goes live and is announced on BGG and a very quiet Reddit page. I must say, the BGG page it was transferred to (Press Releases) is very quiet, too.
• Members opt in to share their shelf on their profile page.
• A view cube for your 3D shelf viewing pleasure.
• Common box shapes as one-press defaults beside box dimension fields, from Mint Tin/Button Shy to Standard Ticket to Ride. (Want to add a few more still.)
• Declare a big box from a pasted BGG link, even for a box nobody here owns as a game.

August 10

• The Un-homed rail (I need a better word for this) gets advanced sorting/filtering and search as you type.
• Declare a big box from the panel, and a game can carry one per season.
• My Accessories page. Some big boxes are expansions, some are Accessories, so the site needed to pull owned Accessories from BGG. (Parts of this are not LIVE yet.)

August 9

• Site remembers your preferred measurements, Inches or Centimeters. Set these in your profile and/or on the Shelf page, and the site will remember.
• More game box positioning, game titles, and photo faces work. NOT EASY.

August 8, 2026

• The box, drawn as a box. Real three-dimensional cubes with all six faces painted, on for everyone. This was mostly an Admin tool for me (and our other Admin): if I take photos of a game from all 6 sides, I upload them, they all slap onto the game, and I can twirl the box around to see if all images applied correctly. Super fun!

[shelf-cube]

August 7

• BGG doesn't have images of game box edges, so we have to invent them. Box edges show the actual art, slightly blurred yet still recognizable as the game, with the game title on a panel using the game's own Cover Palette (as shown on every game page).
• View your shelf in 3D.
• Where is my copy of X? Find a shelved game and the page takes you right to it. (THIS IS THE NUMBER #1 REASON I'M BUILDING THIS! I can never find my games.)
• Rough drafts of big box work and positioning games. Still working on this haha.

August 6, 2026

• The actual page started and was announced as a teaser on BGG.
• Add Rooms, Shelving Units, and Shelves.
• Basic search with filters.
• Basic drag-and-drop functionality started. Discovered board games are more complex than filament spools.

July 11, 2026

• Polled the LayerUp community on BGG to see if they'd like to see Virtual Game Shelves (it was the second-highest vote, though not many votes haha). I had been wanting to build this for years! (The logic for shelves and drag-and-drop functionality was already built earlier this year for the VisualSpool.io site for 3D filament spools, so it was easy to transfer to this site for board games.)