A game can be a hundred-hour adventure, a five-minute ritual, or the reason your group still has a chat going years later. The nine games that feel important rarely make a tidy ranking. They make a story instead: of who you played with, what you were going through, and the kind of worlds you like to get lost in.
Why we made this grid
My 9 Games Template began with a modest idea: make the familiar gaming 3×3 format quick to fill in and pleasant to share. Creating a collage should not require design software, a blank canvas, careful image cropping, and twenty browser tabs. A useful tool can handle the repetitive part while leaving the personal choices to you.
This project is intentionally focused. Open the page, search for a title, and add it to one of nine spaces. When your board feels right, make an image you can save. There is no account setup, public profile, feed, or challenge leaderboard to distract from choosing. A small tool can do one job well without asking to become a social network.
The grid is not a review score or an official “best games” list. Your picks might reflect the games you have actually finished, games you return to for comfort, or games that remind you of another person. Some players build a time capsule for one year; others use the space to introduce their taste. Both approaches belong here.
How the game 3×3 works
Choose any empty square to search a game catalog. Each result includes a cover and basic release information so similarly named games are easier to tell apart. Selecting a result fills that position; you can replace it later if another memory comes to mind. Fill all nine spaces to enable the image maker.
On a laptop or desktop, drag a tile to rearrange the grid. On a touchscreen you can drag with your finger, or use the move arrows to place a selected game where you want it. Keyboard users can focus a tile, move it with the keyboard sensor, and open a result using familiar controls. Each selected game has a remove button so an edit never needs to turn into a full reset.
Your unfinished board is saved to Local Storage in the current browser. That means refreshing the page or returning to the same browser can restore your picks without creating a server account. It also means clearing browser storage or switching devices removes that local draft. When you make the final card, your browser draws the cover art onto a compact portrait canvas and exports a PNG. The image itself is not sent to our server to be assembled.
What makes nine a good number?
Nine is enough room for different kinds of memories, but small enough to scan in one glance. The three-by-three shape is also easy to crop, send in a message, or add to a social post. You can recognize a mood from the covers before you know why those games mattered. That quick recognition is what makes the format such a natural conversation starter.
There is no official set of categories to satisfy. If a few ideas help, start with one or two: a childhood favorite, the first game you finished, a comfort game, your best co-op memory, the world you most wanted to explore, a favorite soundtrack, a game that changed how you think about the medium, a recent surprise, or a title you are still excited to recommend. These are prompts, not rules. Repeated genres, unpopular favorites, and games from any era are all welcome.
Our approach to privacy
The tool has no user account and no permanent public gallery. Your selected game IDs, names, and cover references stay in browser storage so that a draft can be restored on this device. Search phrases have to travel to the game-data service to return useful matches. If optional analytics are configured, they run by default; you can turn them off at any time using the control on the Privacy page.
A downloaded grid can reveal personal interests just like any other image. Treat it as your own content when deciding where to post it. The website does not publish your selections or let other visitors browse them. For the fuller picture of browser storage, infrastructure requests, analytics, and third-party services, read our Privacy Policy.
Where game data comes from
Search results use the configured game catalog, RAWG by default. The title, release year, platform names, and cover image are catalog data supplied by that service. The project retains an optional IGDB database integration through Twitch’s developer API for operators who configure it. Availability and correctness depend on the upstream records; results can be incomplete, delayed, or unavailable for a particular release. We do not own those records or claim that every edition can be found.
My 9 Games Template is an independent fan-made utility. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by RAWG, IGDB, Twitch, game studios, publishers, consoles, storefronts, or the reference websites whose general interaction patterns helped shape this product. Product names and artwork returned by the game database belong to their respective owners and are used to identify the games. Check the applicable catalog and publisher terms if you plan to use an exported collage commercially.
What this first version does not do
To keep the flow lightweight, this version does not accept image uploads, pasted image URLs, or custom cover art. It has no comments, likes, follows, accounts, ratings, permanent hosted boards, or public community collection. It also does not try to decide which games are objectively important. Your reasons for choosing a game are yours; the tool supplies nine neat squares around that choice.
The examples on this page are concept moodboards made with original fictional artwork. They illustrate how a finished grid can feel without suggesting that the illustrated scenes represent catalog results or real community submissions. The actual cover art in your board comes from the game catalog.
Made to be useful, not definitive
We want the editor to welcome a wide range of play styles, budgets, genres, and eras without treating a particular platform or kind of game as the default. A short session can matter just as much as an epic one. A game you have not finished can still be memorable, and a title with a small audience can sit proudly beside a blockbuster. The tool will not rate or rank your choices for you.
The finished card is only one way to keep a list. You might download it for later, send it to a friend, or use it to find common ground with someone new. If a title is missing from the catalog, the editor currently cannot add a custom cover. Search availability depends on the catalog record and the integration staying online; the rest of a saved grid remains in your browser while an upstream service is temporarily unavailable.
Keep your own story in the picture
Whether your grid ends up as a carefully ordered list or nine happy accidents, it belongs to you. Change the order until it reads the way you want. Start over when your favorites have changed. Send the image to a friend and see what story they read in the spaces. We hope this My 9 Games template makes that small act of sharing feel easy.
For questions about how the site works, privacy choices, or the game-data integration, please use the operator’s published contact channel. The operator’s legal name and a monitored email address should be supplied in the production configuration before public launch.
Game covers and metadata are provided through the configured catalog provider, RAWG by default. IGDB/Twitch remains an optional integration. This page is informational and is not a partnership announcement or a statement of endorsement.