Changelog

What's New

What changed in each RuleVault release, and in the pipeline that turns rulebooks into guides.

The vault so far (every guide audited):

100ready guides
49base games
51expansions
Pre-alphaIn active development. Working toward the first mobile release.
AI rules chatTemporarily switched off while we finalise the rules assistant.
July 26, 2026v0.15

Your Data, Your Call

A small release about what leaves your device: RuleVault now asks before collecting anything, and signing out clears up after itself.

Nothing is collected unless you say so

  • Opt-in only: knowing which screens people open and where the app runs into errors helps us fix what matters. We only collect it if you agree.
  • Never the rules you look up: the games you search for and the guides you read stay yours, and nothing is sold to anyone.
  • Yours to change: the switch lives under Profile → Preferences and takes effect straight away.
  • One answer for both apps: your choice is stored on your account, so it carries over to Board Games Tracker as well.

Signing out clears the device

  • Your settings travel with you: preferences leave the device when you sign out, and come back from your account when you return.
  • Deleting means deleting: removing your account now clears all of your data, including what was stored on this device.

Ready for the newest Android

  • Updated for the latest Android versions, ahead of the mobile release.

RuleVault is in pre-alpha. Join the waitlist for the mobile release.  ·  Browse the games with ready guides →

July 20, 2026v0.14

Your Profile, Clearer Guides & a Shelf That Reads Right

RuleVault now has a real profile, the same one you use in Board Games Tracker. Box art is shown whole instead of cropped, and the reference section finally tells you what a symbol actually looks like.

A profile that's actually yours

  • Pick your avatar: choose one of twelve meeples or upload and crop your own photo.
  • Choose your username: set it when you first sign in or change it later. A live check tells you whether it's still free.
  • Shared with Board Games Tracker: your name, username and photo are one profile across both apps, so setting them here sets them there. If you already use BGT, your details are simply there when you arrive.
  • Leave when you want: you can now delete your account and its data from inside the app.

Box art you can recognise

  • Nothing cropped: covers were being cut to a fixed landscape frame, which sliced the title clean off taller boxes. Every cover is now shown whole.
  • A shelf you can page through: your collection now turns three games at a time, so it's obvious there are more behind the first few.

Guides that read better

  • Know what a symbol looks like: the icon reference now describes what each symbol looks like ("small yellow square with a black outline"), so you can match it to the card in your hand. Searching for "red shield" finds it, too.
  • The whole round at a glance: turn phases are listed together instead of hidden behind tabs you had to click through one by one.
  • Room to breathe on desktop: guide sections were cramped on wider screens; they now use the same comfortable spacing as on a phone.
  • No empty sections: a guide with no icons no longer offers an Icons tab that opens onto nothing.

Under the hood

  • Steadier sign-in: fixed a conflict between two sign-in sessions running at once that could interrupt logging in.
  • Terms & privacy at sign-up: what you're agreeing to is now shown when you sign in, with both documents linked.

RuleVault is in pre-alpha. Join the waitlist for the mobile release.  ·  Browse the games with ready guides →

July 17, 2026v0.13

Smarter Search & Sharper Rules

Since the redesign we've rebuilt how you find a game, improved how often the right rulebook passage is found and fixed issues in the guides. The vault is growing too, and it now includes games that don't have an official PDF rulebook at all.

Find any game, even misspelled

  • Typo-proof search: a rebuilt search finds games through misspellings and partial names. A mangled "kolonizten" still lands on Catan.
  • Every name, every edition: search now covers a title's alternative and translated names, not just the English one, and tells you which name matched.
  • The game you meant, first: results rank by relevance and then popularity, so the obvious title rises to the top.
  • No cold-start wait: search warms up the moment the app opens, so your first query is instant.

Rules retrieval

  • Better answers: retrieval tuning means the right rulebook passage is found far more often when a guide is searched.
  • Smaller storage: rulebook data is now stored around 58% smaller with no loss in quality, which leaves room for many more games.
  • Politer refusals: the rules assistant now recognises off-topic or nonsense questions up front and declines cleanly instead of guessing.

Higher-quality guides

  • Cleaner iconography: icon references are de-duplicated and corrected, with garbled symbols removed.
  • More faithful guides: a round of guide audits fixed synthesis issues so setup, scoring, and reference sections track the rulebook more closely.

A growing vault

  • Per-game guide pages: every ready guide now has its own shareable page on the website, alongside a redesigned, searchable library.
  • New games added to the vault, each audited before it goes live.
  • Guides without a PDF: a new ingestion route builds a guide from an official how-to-play video or the printed manual when no PDF rulebook exists. That way newer and indie titles can get guides too.

We also completed a full security audit of the shared database and fixed its findings.  ·  Browse the games with ready guides →  ·  RuleVault is in pre-alpha. Join the waitlist for the mobile release.

June 28, 2026v0.10-0.12

App Redesign & Smarter Rulebook Extraction

We redesigned the RuleVault app from top to bottom and reorganised the game guide around the data we now pull from rulebooks. The offline extraction pipeline that turns official PDFs into structured guides got some big upgrades as well.

Redesigned home

  • Search-first hero: finding a game's rules is now the one obvious action, with a clear, solid search field and an opaque results dropdown.
  • Your collection: a rail of the guide-ready games you own, pulled straight from your shared library, with expansions folded into their base game.
  • Maybe you'll like these: 15 random guide-ready recommendations when your collection is still small.
  • Clear guide indicators: guide-ready vs. not is shown with solid badges and icons instead of fading rows out.

Reorganised game guide

  • Consolidated tabs: Setup · Play (turn flow + actions) · Scoring · Reference · Modes · FAQ. Fewer sections, and clearer ones.
  • Searchable icon reference: filter a game's iconography by symbol or meaning, alongside the glossary.
  • Scorepad tool: the in-session score tracker moved to its own clearly-labelled tool.

Polished sign-in, chat & desktop

  • New sign-in screen that says more clearly what RuleVault is for.
  • Rules chat restyled, with the cited sources easier to see.
  • Cleaner desktop shell: the sidebar only appears when signed in, now with a sign-out button.

Rulebook extraction pipeline

  • Icon extraction & validation: symbols and their meanings are pulled from rulebooks and de-duplicated.
  • Colour extraction: dominant cover colours drive per-game and per-expansion theming.
  • Page classification and reliability fixes in extraction and synthesis.

Browse the games with ready guides →  ·  RuleVault is in pre-alpha. Join the waitlist for the mobile release.

May 14, 2026v0.9

Alpha Waitlist

You can now join the waitlist from the website.

Sign up for early access

  • Waitlist form: drop your email to join the RuleVault alpha.
  • Email trigger: signups are captured and confirmed automatically.

Join the alpha waitlist →

May 3, 2026v0.8

End-to-End Extraction Flow

We built out the full rulebook pipeline, from a raw PDF to a structured, searchable guide, and tested it on the first two games: Wingspan and Gloomhaven, plus Wingspan's expansions.

Extracted this release:

2base games
4expansions
6ready guides

From PDF to guide

  • Structured synthesis: setup steps, turn structure, actions, scoring, icons, and FAQ extracted into a single guide per game.
  • Search embeddings: rulebook text chunked and embedded so it can be searched and answered against.
May 1, 2026v0.6-0.7

The First RuleVault App

The initial RuleVault app, plus the first version of the rulebook-extraction pipeline behind it.

The app

  • Search any game and open its rules guide.
  • Interactive guide: setup checklist, turn-by-turn guide, icon reference, and an in-session score tracker.
  • Rules assistant: ask questions answered from the official rulebook.

The pipeline

  • Extraction started: the offline pipeline that ingests rulebooks took shape, with a README and versioning.
April 25, 2026v0.1-0.5 (Foundations)

Foundations

The groundwork: a shared monorepo with RuleVault alongside Board Games Tracker, authentication, the "Dark Codex" theme, and hosting.

Project setup

  • Monorepo scaffold: RuleVault and Board Games Tracker share one codebase and one Supabase project (one login across both).
  • Auth layer: Google & Discord sign-in, plus the emerald "Dark Codex" design language.
  • Hosting & builds: Firebase Hosting config and Node 22 build fixes across all apps.

RuleVault is the before/during-play companion to Board Games Tracker.

That's every release so far.