Privacy

You can play, print, and make puzzles here without an account and without telling us anything about yourself. An account is optional, and this page says plainly what we hold either way.

Stored in your browser, never sent to us

Your display preferences (dark mode, large print) and your solve history are kept in your own browser's local storage. Puzzle play state — the words you have found so far — stays in your browser unless you ask us to keep your progress.

If you arrive from an advertisement, a search result, or a link on another site, your browser also stores a small record of where that first visit came from: campaign parameters from the address (the utm_ tags, gclid, fbclid), the referring site, and the page you landed on. We tidy those parameters out of the address bar so the link you might share stays clean. The record is read once, when you create an account or ask us to keep your progress, so we can tell which campaigns are worth running. Otherwise it is never sent anywhere, and clearing your browser's site data removes it.

Counted anonymously

We count aggregate engagement — page views, plays, completions, prints — to understand which puzzles people enjoy. These counters use short-lived, one-way-hashed identifiers and cannot be traced back to you.

We also use two outside measurement services, described under Third parties below, to understand how many people visit and what they do here.

We also count arrivals from campaigns, as a daily total per campaign. That counter holds nothing but the date, the campaign name and a number: no address, no identifier, and nothing that could later be joined to a person or an account.

If you create an account

An account stores your email address, the display name you choose, an avatar preference, and your password — hashed, never in a form we or anyone else could read back. If you sign in with Google instead, we store the identifier Google gives us and the address it confirms; we never receive your Google password.

We use your address to send you the messages the account itself needs: confirming your address, resetting your password, and confirming a change of address. Those are part of having an account and are always sent.

We also send occasional puzzle news to account holders; how that works, and how to stop it, is under Email and saved progress below.

For security we record the sign-in and account-change events on your account, along with the IP address and browser the request came from. That record is what lets us investigate a compromised account, and it is not used for advertising.

You can delete your account from your account settings. Deleting it signs out every device straight away. We keep the account for 30 days first, so that we can still help you if you change your mind, and then erase it: your address, name and avatar go, along with your saved puzzles and solve history.

Two things outlive the account, both stripped of anything that names you. The security record of sign-in and account-change events stays, with your address, IP address and browser removed from it. If you have written to support, the conversation stays as an operational record with your address and name removed and the original email discarded — the text of the messages themselves is kept, so anything you typed into one of them is kept with it. If you would rather a conversation went entirely, ask us on the contact page before you delete the account.

Email and saved progress

If you ask us to keep your progress on a puzzle, we store the email address you give, the puzzle, and where you had got to: the words you had found and the time on the clock, or your finished solve and its time. We email you one link. It works once, for 7 days. If it has not been used after 4 days we send one reminder, and the link then works for another 7 days. If the link is never used, we keep the request, marked as unused, and send nothing more to that address because of it.

We also send occasional puzzle news — a short welcome sequence after you join, and an occasional note if you have not played for a while. New accounts receive these unless you say otherwise. Every one of them carries our postal address and an Unsubscribe link that works without signing in, for as long as the message exists: one press on the page it opens, or your mailbox's own unsubscribe button, stops them. There is also a switch in your account settings. Stopping them never affects the account messages above, so unsubscribing can never lock you out of a password reset.

The puzzle list. If you ask for the daily or weekly puzzle by email, we store your address, the level and how often you chose, and a record of your sign-up: when you asked, which page you asked from, which version of the offer you saw, and when you confirmed. We keep an address that is never confirmed for 7 days, then erase it. Every puzzle email carries our postal address and two ways to stop — this list, or everything we send that you did not ask for — and your mailbox's own unsubscribe button stops the list too; unsubscribing from our puzzle news above stops the list as well. We note when you follow a link in a puzzle email; after 30 emails in a row with no link followed, we pause the list and tell you how to restart it on your preferences page. That page, linked from every puzzle email, lets you change the level or how often, pause, stop, or erase everything the list holds about you, without signing in.

Third parties

Sign-up and password-reset forms are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that a request comes from a person rather than a script. Signing in with Google is optional and only happens if you choose it. Our account email is delivered by Mailjet.

Measurement

Two services measure how the site is used. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts page views and page speed; it sets no cookie and holds nothing about you as a person. Google Analytics records which pages are viewed, where visitors arrive from, and a short list of things that happen here: starting a puzzle, finishing one, asking for a hint, printing, using the maker, and creating an account. It sets cookies in your browser and Google processes that data on our behalf.

Every measurement we send carries whether you were signed in at the time — yes or no, and nothing more. We never send anything that identifies you: not your address, not your name, not your account, not an identifier derived from any of them. Nothing you type is ever sent — not the words you put into the maker, not what you write to us on the contact form. Because none of it names you, there is nothing about you in it to delete when you delete your account.

Google keeps the detailed measurement data for 14 months, after which it holds only totals. We have turned off Google's advertising and personalisation features, so none of this is used to build an advertising profile of you.

If you would rather not be measured, turn on your browser's "Do Not Track" or Global Privacy Control setting: we check for it before anything loads, and if it is on, Google Analytics is never loaded and no identifier is stored. A tracker blocker or ad blocker also works, and the site is built to work perfectly with it blocked. Clearing your browser's site data removes what has already been stored.

This site does not currently run third-party advertising. If advertising is added in the future, this policy and an appropriate consent mechanism will be updated first.

Questions? See the contact page.