Privacy Policy

One save file holds your campaign level, the best grade you have earned on every level you have cleared, your journey counters (first-try S levels, best quality combo, daily streak), the chapter of ten levels you are in the middle of, your settings (sound, vibration, reduce motion, appearance), and how far you got through the tutorial. The run in progress carries its board seed and the list of taps you made on it, so a board can be replayed exactly; that list never leaves the device either.

While you are signed out I never receive any of it. Deleting the app removes the file the way your phone normally does.

Two more files appear only once you have used the features that need them. Signing in writes the session file described under the account below. Opening the leaderboard writes a copy of the page of rows it just fetched — other players’ public display names, their counts and their positions — so the board can be shown at once the next time you open it instead of leaving you at a spinner. That copy is refreshed about every ten minutes while the card is open, holds nothing that is not already public to every signed-in player, and is never uploaded anywhere. Google’s ad SDK also stores your answer to its consent form, where that form applies to you, so it is not asked again on every launch.

Where ads appear

Two placements and no more. A banner is anchored to the bottom of the screen while a card is open — Settings, the how-to guide, the leaderboard, and the level-completed and level-failed cards. A rewarded video plays only when you choose it: a card below an S offers to show you half of the shortest solution, and a card that did not open the next level — a C, a D, or a level you ran out of taps on — also offers to skip it. Each of those keys is marked with an ad badge. Declining costs nothing — Try Again is free and always there.

What is shown, and by whom

Both come from Google AdMob. Serving them means Google's advertising SDK runs inside the app, and Google receives information from your device to select, deliver, measure and protect those ads against fraud. That typically includes a device advertising identifier, coarse information about your device and app, and whether an ad was seen, tapped or watched to the end.

What Google does with it is governed by Google's own terms, not mine: see Google's Business Data Responsibility page and How Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services.

Your choices about ads

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, a Google consent form appears before any ad is requested, and your answer decides whether ads can be personalised. The game asks for consent first and starts the ad SDK afterwards, so nothing is requested while the question is still open.

On iOS the game never asks for App Tracking Transparency permission and does not track you across other companies' apps or websites.

On Android you can reset or delete your advertising ID in your phone's Settings ▸ Google ▸ Ads. On iOS, Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Tracking and Apple Advertising control the equivalent.

There is no paid option to remove the banner today.

How it starts

It starts when you tap Continue with Google or Continue with Apple on the account card, and not before. Until then no account of any kind exists for you, no request is made, and the whole campaign — every level, every crest, every setting — works exactly as it does with one. Nothing in the game is behind the sign-in except the leaderboard and the backup.

What the sign-in itself creates

The game trades the credential your provider hands back for a session on Google Firebase Authentication, in a project I control. Firebase then holds an account record for you: a user id it generated, which provider you used, and whatever that provider passed along with the credential — typically the email address on your Google or Apple account and the display name on it. I can see that record in the Firebase console. The game itself never receives the email address; what it keeps is a small file in its own storage holding a refresh token, so you are not asked to sign in again every launch, together with which provider you used and the display name to print on the account card. Signing out deletes that file.

If you use Sign in with Apple you can choose Hide My Email in Apple's own sheet, and then the address Firebase records is Apple's relay address rather than your real one.

What is backed up

Your campaign is copied to Cloud Firestore, to a document only you can read or write, at /saves/<your user id>:

That is the whole payload. It carries no settings, no tap log and no run in progress. The upload happens after a level is graded and on the way to the background, coalesced so a burst of cleared levels costs one write.

The copy on your phone stays authoritative. A failed sync costs nothing, an offline session is a normal session, and the merge when you sign in on a second device only ever adds: every number resolves to the larger of the two and every level keeps the better of its two grades. Signing in on a phone you have already played cannot cost you a level.

What is published

Once you are signed in and have earned at least one S, one row is written for you at /players/<your user id> and it is visible to every other signed-in player:

Nothing else goes up. No row exists until you have perfected a level, and a session that did not improve your standing writes nothing at all. The board is only readable by signed-in players; a player who never signs in neither publishes a row nor sees anyone else's.

Your name on the board

The name comes from your provider, and today the game has no field to change it. If the display name on your Google or Apple account is your real name, that is the name other players will see. If you would rather not publish it, either change the display name on the account you sign in with, or play signed out — the whole campaign works without an account.

When a provider hands back no name at all, the board shows a generated stand-in such as “Player 8F2C” instead, so a row is never blank. Sign in with Apple can also be set to hide your name, in which case that stand-in is what other players see.

If a name on the board is offensive or should not be there, email me and I will remove it.

How to delete it

Settings → your account → Delete my account data means gone, not "no longer shown": it deletes your saved campaign and your board row from the server and deletes the account itself, so the user id is not left behind. On iOS the Apple sheet appears once more first, so that Apple's own authorisation for the game can be revoked at the same time; dismissing it does not stop the deletion.

Signing out, by contrast, only ends the session on this device and leaves what you published in place.

The campaign on your phone is untouched by either — to remove that as well, delete the app. If something goes wrong and a row appears to be stuck, email me and I will remove it by hand.

There are no in-app purchases and no subscriptions. Nothing in the game costs money after you have it, and no level, crest or ability is sold.

There is no analytics SDK. The game notes what happened during a session in memory so the code can reason about the run; that note is capped, never written to disk, never sent anywhere, and it disappears when you close the app.

If you write to me for support, I process what you send — your email address, device and app details, screenshots, and your message — to answer you and to look into problems. I keep support emails for 12 months unless I have a legal or security reason to keep them longer.