Privacy

The rule this site holds: nothing is kept on your device that the site does not need, and nothing that leaves it can follow you from one day to the next.

Sam's Archive keeps your game progress in your browser's local storage, because you asked for your game to be there when you come back. That data never leaves your device and carries no identity.

What the games count. To learn which days' puzzles are too hard or too easy, the games report a few plain events. They record that a daily puzzle was opened and started, and whether each guess was right, never what the guess was. They record how the puzzle ended: won or lost in Kaboose, how many letters you reached in Alphabetle. They also record how long the tab was open and in view, and whether the screen was phone, tablet or desktop sized. Practice games are not counted. Kaboose, which lives at kaboose.io, sends the same events here.

How visits are told apart. The site needs to know when several events came from one visitor on one day, without a cookie or anything stored on your device. To do that, the server mixes your IP address and browser name with a secret and the date, and keeps only the scrambled result. Your address and browser name are used for that one calculation and then dropped; they are never stored or logged. The scrambled code changes every morning at 5am New York time, so no one, the site's owner included, can connect one day's play to another's. The counts are approximate on purpose: two people sharing a network and a browser look like one, and one person on two devices looks like two.

If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, none of these events are sent at all.

The site also keeps simpler counts from before this: which game, which day, the outcome, the score and how long it took, with nothing that connects one event to another. For Alphabetle it also counts how far a run got. The most these record about where you are is a two-letter country code, which Vercel works out before the request reaches the site.

When Alphabetle refuses an answer, its results page offers to send it for review, in case the game is missing a real one. Only the words you tick are sent, with the theme, the letter and the day, and nothing that identifies you goes with them. A person reads every reported word before it can be added to the game.

Hosting. The site runs on Vercel, which, like any host, sees your IP address with every request. Vercel's own records of requests are covered by its privacy policy, not this page. This site's code never writes your address, your browser name or what you send into its logs.

There are no third-party scripts, no advertising and no tracking pixels, and players have no accounts. If any of this changes, this page changes first.