Games and 3D Models - What's New

Log notes of Features and Fixes across Games, My Games, My Accessories and 3D Models

This is everything that has happened to the games and 3D models side of LayerUp since the very first day, newest first. A lot of it exists because somebody on BoardGameGeek told me it was broken or told me what was missing, so thank you, genuinely. If you spot something wrong or want something added, send it my way on the Contact page.

September 9, 2026

You can ask somebody to be your friend from their Maker page, and from their face anywhere on the site. Until now the only way was to remember the name and go and search it on the friends page, which is a silly thing to ask of anybody.
Two members who are friends get the Message door on each other's face. They had been getting nothing there, which is exactly the sort of thing that looks fine from the outside.
The shelf on a maker's profile page is a real shelf now, so you can grab a box and turn it, and press the button to see the row hiding behind the front one. It turns out the page was drawing all of those controls with none of the code behind them, so nothing happened when you clicked (which is a fun thing to find out about your own site).

September 8, 2026

I rebuilt the Designers directory around two groups of columns. Their numbers come first, which is Models, Games and Likes from the host, and then mine, which is Kanban, Prints, Hearts and Followers. All four of mine sort, and the page opens on the Kanban column, so the designers whose work people here are actually planning to print come first.
Designers wear a face now, and if a designer is also a member here it is the face they picked themselves.
There are host chips on every row so you can see where somebody publishes, and a little bar under the models count so the big designers stand out at a glance.
You can filter the whole directory down to only the designers you follow, which makes it a much smaller and much more useful page.
The Kanban column counts the whole board now, successful prints included. It had been quietly leaving some of them out.
A game page will ask "Looking for X?" at the top when X is its Big Box, or when the game you are on is the Big Box of something else. It sits off to the right and stays quiet. That one was Matthew's idea.
Friends arrived. If you play games with people who are also here, or you only know them online, this is where you add them. They have to accept, and once it is mutual the two of you can message each other. There is a Block too, and it cuts both ways.
The Scorepad Beta 1.0 is open to every member instead of just me. Please tell me what you want it to do.
A play you log here can be posted to BoardGameGeek in the same press or later on, and editing or removing it here does the same on BGG. Your password is used for the one request and kept nowhere.

September 7, 2026

Every person credited on a box now has a page of their own, with their design credits and their art credits together in one place and their promos folded away. Every credit on a game page links to one.
A model's page moved from /print/ to /model/. Every old link redirects permanently, so nothing you have ever shared anywhere is broken.
A model can name the extras somebody made to go with it, and both pages show the link. If a designer cut a token tray meant for their insert, the two finally know about each other.
Direct messages arrived, so you can have a private word with another member. You can always write to me, Kamio, and I can write back.
Hovering a maker's face gives you View Profile if they are public, their Designer page if they have one, and Message when the site lets the two of you speak.

September 6, 2026

The Scorepad grew a second stage. Your plays for a game show on its Layer by Layer page, My Games carries a count, you can read a BG Stats file straight in, and the nightly job walks members' plays so a game you logged on your phone is waiting here in the morning.
Submit a 3D Model will take up to five more links for the same model on other hosts, because one model living in four places should be one listing.
A game page tells you which shelf your copy is sitting on, with a link that takes you there, right under the title and year.
My Games shows what you own by default, with a dropdown for pre-orders.
A game you have on pre-order can hold its spot on the shelf, drawn faint with an outline round it, so the gap it is going to fill is already there.
A model that fits can be set as the current insert from the page you are already on, and a box will offer you every expansion BoardGameGeek links to that game.
If you re-type a model so it is no longer an insert, it gets un-named from every box it was in instead of leaving a stale claim sitting there.
Typing "and" will also look for "&", and the other way round, anywhere you search a game name.

September 5, 2026

My Table gave its slot in the menu back. Games holds the rooms now, and My Games and My Wishlist became two tabs instead of two separate menu items.
The My Games tabs say where their games came from when you hover them, Re-sync moved up into the header, and the numbers moved down to the foot.
When you refresh a model it tells you which host it is waiting on, rather than spinning at you in silence.
The Scorepad started here, late that night, as a place to log a play. Admins only to begin with, which is how everything of this size starts on the site.

September 4, 2026

You can own more than one copy of a game. Each copy gets a door of its own, its own edition, and whatever name you call it by, and the BoardGameGeek sync leaves the pair alone.
A comment on a model gets three times as much room, because people were writing real thoughtful things into a box built for one sentence.
Premium sleeves are the thick ones, so they fit anywhere the thin ones do.

September 3, 2026

Advanced Search came to the 3D models browse, and all three browses share one panel now, so whatever you learn on one page works on the other two.
You can pick a genre and the games arrive without the page reloading, and the same is true for a Family, on My Games as well.
Page 2 of a search is the same search. It had been quietly dropping your filters when you turned the page, which I am sorry about.
My Games will answer the question "what should I print next?"
A tag can answer to more than one name, so the thing you call a card tray finds the thing somebody else called a deck holder.
Every box on the browse reads at one size, and a designer's own words get enough room to actually be read.
A model that was remixed from somebody else's work says so, and names what it came from. The Remix box stays shut until a model actually is one.

September 2, 2026

Layer by Layer got its name and opened up to everyone. It is everything you have on one game in one place: BoardGameGeek's numbers, the links, the cover colors, where your copy is shelved, your notes, your plays, your prints, your card sleeves, and the expansions and promos you own. The link rides the game page's title row, and a visitor who is not signed in gets the catalog half of it plus a line inviting them in.
Models have tags now, from a shared list steered by a typeahead that starts after two letters, so the tags converge on each other instead of sprawling. A model can be two types at once, and a designer's own tags earn their keep.
The model page got a full day of tidying. The three provenance stamps ride one line, the print profiles fold away, the first five tags ride along in the source box, the filament check became a row in the pre-flight list, and the Sync stamp reads like a time a human would write.
The filament line tells you roughly how many grams it needs and wears the spool, with the cost sitting right underneath it.
Cover Colors took the shape of the game band, with wide swatches and the matches opening in a window.
The Card Sets panel shows to everyone now, and it stopped explaining where the sizes came from (you do not need me to footnote a card size).
Kanban's Queue and Done columns link straight through to My Future Prints and My Prints.

September 1, 2026

Card Sets grew into a proper panel drawn the way BoardGameGeek draws them, with the card outlines to scale, the quantity inside each one, all of them hanging from a shared top line, and each wearing its matched sleeve size in the FFG color. Pick your edition, tick the add-ons you own, and the counts recount live.
An expansion can finally have two parents. A crossover that expands two different base games is recorded against both of them instead of being filed under whichever one happened to come first.
Filament matching now works color by color. The colors you pick become big tabs, the matches show the top ten with a Show all underneath, there is a switch between my spools and all filaments, and the rows for spools you own tell you how many grams you have left.
You can say "just my PLA" with material chips on the match dialog, and pick as many materials as you like.
The filament check says only what the model would cost you, roughly, worked out from your own spool prices.
You can connect to VisualSpool in one click instead of copying a token across by hand.
Promo cards count on the Card Sets panel.

August 31, 2026

Lifting a shelf turns that one shelf in 3D instead of the whole wall, which is much kinder on the eyes and much easier to aim at.
A cube cannot shrink below a thumb, and a finger gets one clear target on a phone.
Another version of a game can live in its relative's box, so your Big Box holds the copy you actually own whichever printing that is.
The wall arrives noticeably faster. The covers decode off the main thread, the icons come from one cached file, and a font the page was not even using came off it.

August 30, 2026

A page filtered to one publisher is its own page now, so you can link to it and share it.
The closed list on Advanced Search is a Genre, and it says so quietly.

August 22, 2026

Advanced Search came to My Games, so you can search your own collection by how many people are playing and how old they are.
The edition you own answers the publisher search, which means you can search Devir and find Planta Nubo.
The My Games stats box moved down to the foot of the page and over to the right, out of the way of the games themselves.

August 21, 2026

Your BoardGameGeek notes come across on import, so a copy arrives carrying how you got it and what you wrote about it, and you can record what it cost you and what it is worth now either by hand or from that same file. It all shows on My Games, and the notes stay private to you. One upload feeds every import button on the site.
The last few places that still said "prints" now say "models".
A title you have cleaned up by hand survives re-enrichment, the same way a hand-picked image does. Fixing a name used to last exactly until the next sync, which was maddening.

August 20, 2026

Advanced Search arrived on All Games, and it fills itself in as you type.
The Mechanic box says nothing until you have typed something, and then it offers you mechanics.
You can search by BoardGameGeek family, off links the site had been throwing away all along.
Every credit on a game is a link.
3D Model Collections arrived, so you can group models however you like, whether that is dice towers, card holders, resources or something nobody else would think of. Keep a collection private or share it publicly, and that is your call either way.

August 18, 2026

Searching Flügelschlag finds Wingspan, and a copy shows the box it actually is.
If you think of your shelves as one continuous shelf, there is a view for that: the whole room drawn at once, every unit to the same ruler, and the tab names the room it opens.
Your profile draws one shelf and it has to be the one you picked. It had been quietly showing a different unit whenever the featured one was empty, which nobody could have spotted from the outside.
Two warnings the build had been shrugging at turned out to be real, and one of them was crashing Cults3D models.

August 17, 2026

"Are you looking for" arrived on game pages, built from BoardGameGeek's own reimplementation links, so a remake points at what it remade and the original points forward. It uses BGG's words, Reimplements and Reimplemented by, with the publication year behind each name.
"Same series" reads BGG's Game family as a second source for the same question.
The card sleeves work started here, with a database of the major sleeve brands and their sizes behind it, and sleeve sizes on the game page.
Sleeve pack photos went into the table, and the site stopped rewriting the owner's Amazon links.

August 15, 2026

Add Game asks you for one id and goes and fetches the rest of the game itself.

August 14, 2026

The game's own facts moved above the models, because you came for the game.
Anyone can flag a page that is wrong, not just a single model at a time.
The credits became the first stat tile, the tiles shrank, and the flag joined the rail.
Submit joined the models headline, the tallies dropped under the grid, and the color swatches became bars.
A model can say it is in 1 Kanban, or in 5 Kanbans, so you can see what other people are actually planning to print.
The card tooltip only appears when a name is cut off, and when it does appear you can read it.

August 13, 2026

Members press Update Stats, because Enrich is a word only curators speak.
That button reaches Thingiverse now, not just the hosts it already knew about.
The stats card got its geometry sorted out, with the glance stats up top, the timeline on the left and the actions on the right.
Refresh became a glyph in one corner, living where the freshness story is told, and hovering it names the host it is about to go and ask.
An insert cut for a box can be named by whatever is standing in that box, and naming a Current Insert marks it Printed on your Kanban.
A copy carries its owner's notes, and the Owned line knows the way to the shelf. The storage location link lands pointing at the right shelf with the game highlighted.
A single heart is worth showing.
The accessory row stopped assigning chores to members, and the accessories list stopped telling you to declare a box, because an accessory is not a box.

August 12, 2026

You can say what actually lives in a game box on your shelf, so the game, its expansions and its accessories fold into the one box the way they do at home.

August 11, 2026

My Accessories got a search that answers as you type, so you type a game name and it shows you everything you own for that game.
Your 3D shelves can show on your profile, with one shelf picked out to lead, and only you get to decide that.
There are common box shapes to pick from instead of reaching for a tape measure.
The units choice says which system it is, rather than making you guess.

August 10, 2026

My Accessories arrived, syncing from BoardGameGeek, so the Big Boxes, the metal coins, the GeekUp bits and everything else of that sort are on the site with the games they belong to.
A box names its insert, spares get a list of their own, and titles finally read upright.
Mechanic names stopped shredding, and the rail grew groups, bands and a find box that shows its work.
Add Game stopped erroring on a form field it was throwing away anyway, and boxes learned how to be declared.
An unmeasured box stopped shrinking the cover.

August 9, 2026 Launch weekend

The Maker Avatar Studio opened, with real 3D avatars to build yourself out of. You pick the background, and you can twirl the thing around and look at it. The figure fills its coin, the tiny coins show the face, and the Maker page went big to make room for it.
A Maker page can hold the real model, hand it over, and tell you where it lives.
The page a maker shares introduces the site to whoever opens it, and your profile link posted anywhere social arrives wearing your own avatar.
A maker's collection and their loves became real cards with photos on them.
Maker cards are drawn overnight now and capped at two at a time, because drawing them inside a request took the whole site down on launch day. That was a long afternoon and I am not in a hurry to repeat it.
The wishlist pager was pointing at a road that does not exist. Thanks, Matthew.
You can read the whole site in inches or centimeters, and it remembers which you chose.

August 8, 2026

A model can be a game's and a generic accessory at the same time, because a dice tower made for Wingspan is still a dice tower.
The images were 300px in slots that wanted 560, and the hero was preferring the smaller file, so everything got noticeably sharper.
An accented letter was punctuation as far as the slug generator was concerned, so Café was losing its e in the URL.

August 7, 2026

3D Printing Resources went up, with a dice generator in it.
Added, Edited and Enriched all show, along with who did the enriching, so the whole history of a page sits in one place.
You can page through a model's gallery where it stands, without opening the big image first.
A mirrored listing names its designer only when it is somebody else's work.

August 6, 2026

Paid models say what they cost in your own money, and the currency picker wears its symbols.
Game pages state their box size, taken from one edition that can actually be named.
Measure a big box once and everybody's shelf draws it right.
Boards & Maps became a type of its own.
The geeklist remembers its own filing and stopped overruling the curator.
Hub models stopped reserving a column for a game they do not have.

August 5, 2026

Print Plates and Plan Your Print became one panel, plate details got named, and the nozzle finally found its level.
The source box became one card covering everywhere a model lives, telling the whole host story, with the dates kept on the left card.
The geeklist section unfolds to show its date, its submitter and the blurb out in the open.
Profile covers self-host as thumbnails, and the printer list came aboard.
The Edit Model page grew a rail, the danger zone stepped aside, and the boxes finally agree with each other.
Uses Magnets became a flag, because it changes whether you can print the thing at all.
Every confirmation dialog that had never actually confirmed anything got fixed, site wide (that one was quietly embarrassing).

August 4, 2026

Model descriptions show in full, because the fold was hiding the content it was supposed to be folding.
MyMiniFactory enriches through its API instead of a scrape that was getting blocked.
Enrich self-hosts the cover, so the nightly job stops crawling for pictures the site already has.
Pasted remix credits became links, and YouTube links lift themselves out of a description.
BoardGameGeek usernames are allowed to contain spaces, so Peter R can save his profile now.
Ticking an email notification box turns it on, which it really should have been doing already.

August 3, 2026

You can back a bounty instead of filing a duplicate one.
Model timestamps read in your own time rather than UTC.
Moderators can flag a whole game page, and flagging ten pages sends one email instead of ten.
Removing a model is not a moderator power on any page, and when one is removed the reason gets recorded. Two geeklists can overturn a removal.
Follow became a meeple, and the phone got its photo back.
Typing a model id into the command palette finds the model.

August 2, 2026

The Wingspan theme landed, which is another light theme, this one bird-themed and taken from the game, with sky blue surfaces, bird-card cream, warmer filter bars, a hairline on the cards, and a hummingbird hiding in the command palette for anyone who goes looking.
One host list stopped being five host lists.

July 31, 2026

"With prints only" became "With 3D models" on the game filters.
You can paste a profile URL into your profile and the handle gets pulled out of it, and if a handle is not a valid username the page tells you instead of failing quietly.

July 30, 2026

Any signed-in member gets five Refresh credits a day on the instant hosts, so you do not have to wait for an admin or for Scout to come round to a stale page.
The Makers directory got pagination, a Photos sort and a sortable Kanban column.
The result line shows the filtered total rather than the number of rows on the page you are looking at. That one came straight from a BoardGameGeek report, so thank you.
Game Enrich refreshes cover colors even when BoardGameGeek bounces the request.
The Any-price option on the browse had been doing absolutely nothing. It works now.

July 29, 2026

I did a full mobile audit and fixed what it found, which was phone-width overflow, things stacking in the wrong order, and touch targets too small to actually hit.

July 28, 2026

Game-Specific 3D Models moved to /game-models and picked up a host-likes sort.
The browse sorts grew up, with Most Downloads and Most Loved available both on the repositories and here, across all three browses.
My Notes arrived, sitting just above Table Talk, so you can keep a note to yourself on a model and on a game. Nobody else sees it, and it is folded open by default when you are signed in.
My Games got a "Has no insert" filter, and only actual inserts count as inserts.
Future Prints and My Prints keep your filters and your page when you save something inline.
A designer whose work is cross-linked shows their handle for each host above the matching repository link.
A rejected designer claim now tells the member why, which it should have done from the start.
Promo cards stopped leaking into "Also fits".

July 27, 2026

"3D Prints" became "3D Models" across the whole site, in the nav, the forms, the bounties and the copy. The poll I ran here had 67 percent of you voting for 3D Models, which was a relief.

July 25, 2026

"Keep Existing Cardboard Insert" became a model feature, because some inserts are designed to sit on top of the cardboard insert or a GameTrayz container rather than replace it. The pre-flight box got tidier while I was in there.
A model page shows a tally of the makers who have it on their Kanban, so you can see who else is planning to print it.

July 24, 2026

Designers can remove a listing themselves, or opt out of the site entirely, without emailing me and waiting.
Designers get cross-linked across platforms, so one person with four host accounts is one person here.
Host profiles are cached, which is why MakerWorld avatars and bios actually show up.
The model filter on a game page defaults to All instead of Inserts. That was a Reddit ask and it was the right call.

July 23, 2026

Table Talk arrived, which is a chat thread beside the images on a model page, for when you just want to leave a note everybody can see. It started life as plain Comments and got a better name a few hours later.
Fallback avatars became a colored circle with a light initial instead of nothing at all.
Catan claimed its Cities models, and the browse became crawlable.
The print ladder shows the Printed checkmark only when something was actually printed.

July 22, 2026

Kanban BG went up. It is a drag-and-drop print board with color-coded columns to help you plan your prints, real 3D-print icons in the headers and a stacked wordmark, and the Done cards nudge you to add a photo and a comment (the photo gallery was young and a little lonely at that point).
The Maker's Kanban turned the print pipeline into a ladder, and the rungs flip in place with no reload.
Filament readiness came to the model page, which answers the only question that really matters: can I print this thing tonight.
Print Profiles arrived with icons, each one tinted, each showing its own cover photo.
Slice stats get captured from MakerWorld, so you get the print time, the filament and the plate count.
Print reports became structured, with the printer and material you used.
The model page got its first real remake, with calmer type, the facts first, and the answers you came for up at the top.

July 21, 2026

You can tag several games to one model, so a set of trays that fits four games is filed under all four.
Approved designers can edit and enrich their own models, and Feature up to three of them.
Machine translation arrived for models written in another language, with Korean and Japanese detected.
Search stopped caring about accents everywhere, so Gugong matches Gùgōng, and it works on designers and every game-name box.
The model page got a redesign into three columns, with softer pills, the support nudge moved under the host button, and the designer's name in bold where it belongs.
Fit links count as "models for this game" everywhere, not just on game pages.
A removed model 404s instead of staying reachable by link.
The submit form got a honeypot, a timing trap and a hundred-a-day cap per account, because that is the world we live in.

July 20, 2026

The Game Cover Color Palette arrived, reading two or three dominant colors straight off the box art and giving you their hex codes, so you can go looking for filament that matches the game. Everything the filament matching does hangs off this one idea.
Cross-host duplicate linking went in, so the same model hosted in several repositories becomes one page with a colored dot and a link for each of them, instead of four near-identical rows. Orange is Printables, green is MakerWorld, blue is Thingiverse and purple is Cults3D.
The game page got redesigned six times in one day, which is not a typo. It ended up models first, in two columns, on a parchment light theme, with host dots, a swatch preview and the calls to action moved into a rail that pins as you scroll.
"You might also like" ranks by shared mechanics rather than by popularity, which makes it worth reading.
My Games got a BoardGameGeek Rank sort, and it became the default.

July 18, 2026

Game filament palettes got wired to VisualSpool's live matching, so you can pick a color off a box and see what is on your own shelf that matches it.
Photo hearts came to the lightbox.
The Add color button in the palette editor did nothing at all, because the site's own security policy was blocking the script behind it.

July 17, 2026

Photo Hearts arrived, so you can heart any model photo on the browse, the model page or a maker page, with the counts showing on My Photos.
Designer pages got proper URLs like /designer/pandastic-toys, and the old name-based links redirect.
Designers can claim their own page, with me approving it.
Fix this model became a real section for saying what is wrong, and model comments carry a sentiment verdict.
Printed and Want toggles came to the browse pages, so you can mark things without opening them.
The models browse defaults to community picks, which is the models that came in through BoardGameGeek geeklists and the ones LayerUp members added, with Everything sitting there for when you want the firehose.
Future Prints got build-stage flags, Up Next and In Progress.
Moderators got a shield badge and I got a crown, and the flash messages became floating toasts.

July 16, 2026

My Shelf became My Games, with a new URL and My Game Wishlist beside it, and the word shelf came out of the copy entirely.
3D-Printed Games came back out of the menu two days after it went in. There is a lot of junk out there and the section needs a better filter before it is worth your time, so it is waiting on that.
The model page got a heavy pass, with a segmented Printed and Want toggle, the host facts and the LayerUp facts grouped into a card, a collapsible description, a designer shelf and the game credits on the page.
"Add to My Prints" became "I Printed This", which then toggles to "In My Prints".
The Board Games browse got titled dropdowns, clean URLs and a memory for your page size.
My Games and the Wishlist got a proper mobile treatment.
Future Prints got personal batching tags, so you can tag models with a color and plan a print batch around them. That one was tungufoss's idea.
MyMiniFactory's brand color was wrong in all six places it appeared, which is the kind of thing that bothers me.

July 15, 2026

I did a readability pass across the whole site and raised every size that was under the floor.
The game detail page separates BoardGameGeek's data from LayerUp's, and puts the models above the fold.
Cults3D enrichment arrived, bringing the description, views, downloads, license, gallery and tags.
Anycubic MakerOnline joined as a recognized platform.
3D Printing Resources went up, with generators and modular systems for makers.
Browse searches survive missing punctuation.
A model's description is only labeled "From BoardGameGeek" when it actually is.

July 14, 2026

Tabletop Accessories got a home of its own for the dice towers, card holders and storage that are not tied to one game, with eight categories, searchable and paginated.
3D-Printed Games became a section of its own.
Admin Fix Now lets a reported fix be applied inline, instead of the site filing a report against itself.
The game cover on a model page moved around all afternoon and finally landed floating at title level, at 200px, with a caption you can actually read.
The browse went five across, wider, 25 to a page, free by default.
"Wrong print type" became a report reason.

July 13, 2026

Reports carry a suggested fix with the right game and model type, so I can approve one in a single click.
A model page credits the geeklist poster who filed it, by name.
The Makers listing never refuses an opt-in. If you would rather not give a name you are an Anonymous maker, by choice.
Uploaded avatars show on the Makers pages and contributor profiles.

July 12, 2026

Future Prints, which is what you plan to print, and My Prints, which is what you already have, became real pages, with a Game Wishlist synced from BoardGameGeek beside them.
A model has a gallery now, holding every image the designer uploaded, and host tags arrived with it, along with taller cards, a designer byline, and a WebP fix that made every image smaller and sharper at once.
The command palette grew thumbnails on the game, designer and recent rows, and a Designers section.
Etsy joined as a platform for curated listings, including physical items rather than files.
You can tick a game's expansions right on the model, so "also fits" is something set rather than hoped for.
Model features arrived, with things like Sleeve Friendly, Premium Sleeves, No Lid Lift and Vertical Storage, and YouTube embeds inside a description.
Account settings got a proper home, with password change, email change, My Photos and connected accounts.
The real date a model landed on LayerUp is recorded, so the footer stops claiming things were added before the site existed.
Sideways share embeds got fixed by baking the photo's rotation in.

July 11, 2026

The database passed 20,000 inserts, tokens, trays and upgrades.
You voted for richer designer pages, so every designer got a page of their own at their own URL, listing all their work, with a host profile band, stats, platform and category chips, their top games and a Follow button.
The Designers directory went up, sortable, with hearts and follows on it.
Model requests became community bounties instead of a queue that only I could see, with a banner on the game page and a Reopen button for the person who asked.
Mobile arrived properly, with a two-up game grid and a hamburger nav. Before this the site had almost no mobile styling at all, which I am not proud of.
The nav got an avatar menu, and you can upload an avatar, so your face shows on your pages with your links to edit your profile and change your theme sitting under it.
Removing a model leaves a tombstone rather than a hole, and the confirmation shows you the image first so you know what you are about to do.
"Related games" became "You might also like", and it explains why it is showing you them.
Uploading a photo got a reason to bother, with first-printed-by credit, a be-the-first empty state, and a nudge right after you report a print.
Member submissions publish automatically instead of waiting on me.
Every "we" and "our" in the copy became "I", because it is one person and it felt silly pretending otherwise.

July 10, 2026

The command palette arrived on Ctrl-K, with a slash for searching the page you are on and a window listing the keyboard shortcuts.
Model categories got a real taxonomy, a keyword classifier to file things automatically, and filter chips to browse by. Everything is one of Inserts, Tokens and Resources, Card and Deck Holders, Miniatures, Player Dashboards, Scoring, Terrain and Scenery, or Dice Towers and Trays.
The matching got cleaner, so models land on the right game more often than they did.
The image caches went in, self-hosting the covers and the model images as WebP thumbnails. Pages carrying a lot of heavy images, the Cults3D ones especially, got dramatically faster that day.
You can submit a model by pasting a URL and letting the form fill itself in.
There is a Report button for flagging a model that is filed under the wrong game, with a queue behind it so the flag actually gets worked.
Promos get detected from BoardGameGeek's family links, so they stop cluttering the browse.
The models on a game page became a card grid, four across, paginated.
Sorting learned to ignore a leading The, An and A, so A Feast for Odin stopped filing under A.
The insert toggles post without a reload, so the page stops jumping around under you.

July 9, 2026

My Shelf arrived, which is your BoardGameGeek collection synced across, with pagination, search and filters. It is the page you know today as My Games.
Has Insert became a flag you can set by hand as well as one derived from what you have collected, with a badge and a filter to match.
Live game search went in, with proper SEO slugs behind it.
The game pickers became a database-backed typeahead instead of shipping the entire catalog to your browser, which is as bad an idea as it sounds.
There is a maintenance page for database outages now, after finding out the hard way that one was needed.
Email settings got granular, so you choose what you hear about.
Every em-dash came out of the copy.

July 7, 2026

The VisualSpool integration went in, bringing filament stats and letting you log a print straight from your collection.
Print reports arrived to answer the question "did it print well?", with fit and supports votes and room for comments.
There is a public stats page for the whole site.
Your own stats dashboard went up under Profile, with prints per month, your top games and designers, and which repositories they came from.
Email notifications arrived for a photo approved, a designer claim approved, and a new model for a game on your wishlist.
Link previews and SEO went in, so a game or a model posted anywhere shows up with its photo instead of a bare link.

July 6, 2026

Print photos arrived, so you can upload what you made. They are stored properly, screened before they go live, and browsable in a lightbox with arrow keys.
Hearts arrived, as a public "I love this model" toggle, with a Most Loved sort to go with them.
Public profiles became a thing you can opt into, and the Makers directory went up. About a third of everybody registered has chosen to be on it.
Your collection became searchable, with a print date you can edit.
I did a security hardening round, and then another one.

July 4, 2026

The host's own description goes at the top of a model page, with the BoardGameGeek blurb labeled underneath it.

July 2, 2026

Games got their publisher, categories and mechanics, and expansions got linked to their base game.
Design and art credits split apart, with the year beside the title.
Game descriptions honor BoardGameGeek's paragraph breaks instead of running together into one block.
Covers show the whole cover, letterboxed rather than cropped, and load lazily.

July 1, 2026 Back to work

Seven weeks after the first burst in May, I picked the site back up, and it has barely stopped since.
BoardGameGeek approved my API access, and every BGG game came in behind it. Until this day the catalog was the 1,294 games I had imported from my own collection.
The last of the old name came out of the code. It had said LayerUp Games on screen since the second day, but it was still BoardGamePrints underneath the whole time.
A game page shows a model's thumbnail and the date the repository published it.
New games with models get enriched first, so nothing lands on the site blank.
Dead-link strikes went in, so a listing that has disappeared from its host stops pretending otherwise, along with a backoff for when a host asks for a rest.

May 6, 2026

Registration sends an email confirmation, and a Google sign-in is confirmed automatically since Google has already done that part.
The games and models lists got pagination, because 1,294 games on one page is not a page.
There is a password policy and an account lockout.
I did a security pass, adding a content security policy and rate limiting, and moving every inline script out to its own file.
Ranked games sort by rank properly, with the unranked and the zero-ranked left out of it.
And then it sat for seven weeks, waiting on BoardGameGeek API access. That came through quickly, but by the time it did I had moved over to VisualSpool.io, and I came back to LayerUp on July 1.

May 5, 2026

You can sign in with Google.
Profiles arrived, with a display name, a bio, repository links, and tabs for your collection, your wishlist and your activity.
Add to Collection and Want to Print went onto a model's page. Those were the first two things a member could actually do here.
There is a contact page that sends real email.
The footer got rebuilt into three centered rows.
I ran a security audit and fixed what it found, including one that let a signed-in member edit somebody else's row by guessing a number.

May 4, 2026

Accounts arrived, so you can register, log in and log out, and there is an admin role behind it.
The database moved from SQLite to PostgreSQL, which is what it still runs on today.
One shared nav went in across every page, in two rows, with light and dark mode.
The colors moved into variables instead of being typed by hand in forty places. Every theme the site has had since is built on that one afternoon.
There is a favicon.

May 3, 2026

The homepage you know went in, with the hero, the search, a stats bar reading real counts and platform tiles you can click.
Submit an STL arrived with a review page behind it. That is the ancestor of today's Submit a 3D Model.
Suggest an STL arrived too, with a Type field and a Dismiss action, which is where the 3D Model Bounties came from.
Game detail pages got their real fields and a proper design, with a link out to BoardGameGeek.
There is a sticky nav, a back to top button and a shared footer.
The 404 and error pages got styled instead of showing the framework's own.
Privacy and About pages went up.
Migrations run on startup, so a deploy brings the database along with it.

May 2, 2026 Day one

The first commit.
It was called LayerUp Games before the day was out.
Board games went in, with a card layout, a search and a detail page.
I imported my own BoardGameGeek collection from a CSV file, which was 1,294 games, to have something to work with while I waited for BoardGameGeek to approve API access. That is where this whole catalog starts.
An STL model went in with real fields and dropdowns, listed with badges, searchable and filterable, showing on the game it belongs to.
There was an admin toggle that showed the edit and delete buttons only when I wanted them.
The homepage had a hero image on it, which felt like a very big deal at the time.

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