Connected by Boards

Privacy

Last updated 23 September 2026

Connected by Boards is a free set of board games you open in a browser. Nobody signs up, so we hold very little about anyone. Here is that little: what it is, where it is kept, and when it goes.

In brief

• There is no account and no password. We never ask for your name or an email address.
• A room you open with somebody is kept on our server for 48 hours after the last move, then deleted. It holds the position and any name you typed, and nothing that identifies you.
• Voice stays off until you turn it on, and the sound goes from one browser to the other.
• The analytics we use set no cookies and keep no profile.
• No advertising runs on this site and no ad network is contacted.

Nothing to sign up for

You open a board and play. Nowhere on this site asks you to register, so there is no login, no profile and no contact detail of yours on our side unless you write to us. A display name, if you give one, labels your seat in one room. It is not kept as an identity.

Opening a room and sending the link

A room is made on our server when you press the button, under a random id that is listed nowhere. You get a link for the other seat and you send it to the person you want to play. Whoever holds that link can take the seat, so send it to somebody you mean to sit down with.

Before a room is made, a Cloudflare Turnstile check runs: a quiet test that a person pressed the button and not a script. It loads a small script from Cloudflare. It is not advertising and it does not follow you around the web.

Voice and chat

Every board seats two, and every room offers voice. It is off until you switch it on, and each of you is asked for the microphone first. The sound goes straight between your two browsers and does not pass through us. Nothing is recorded.

To find that direct route, your browser asks public STUN servers, run by Google and by Cloudflare, how it can be reached, so those servers see your IP address. When no direct route can be made, the sound is relayed through Cloudflare instead, and the moves can travel the same way.

Chat messages pass through our server to the other seat and are never stored. The server counts how many were sent and keeps none of the words.

What our server keeps

The room itself is kept so that either of you can close the tab and come back to the same position: the board as it stands, who sits on which side, and a display name if one was typed. It is deleted 48 hours after the last move and belongs to no account, because there are none.

So that one person cannot open a hundred rooms at once, your IP address is hashed with a secret value the moment it arrives. The hash counts your open rooms and is kept with the room so the count can go down when the room closes. The address is never written down, and the hash cannot be turned back into it.

For each room we also keep a line of what it cost to run: its random id, which board, how many seats, how long it lasted, how many moves and messages went through, and when it opened and closed. No name, no address and no IP appear in any of it.

What stays in your browser

A few small things are kept on your own device, never on our server, so you can find your way back:

• a token for each room you opened or joined, which is what the list of games still in progress on a board page is built from,
• a random id for this browser and the display name you last typed,
• what you last searched for in the library, until you close the tab,
• which page you have just left, for a few seconds, so the next one can slide in from the right side.

A game on one screen or against the computer

These are kept nowhere. The position lives in the open tab, and when the tab closes the game is gone. Nothing about it is sent to our server. That is a plain account of what the code does, not a privacy feature we built on purpose.

Analytics

To count roughly how many people come and which boards they open, we use Umami. It sets no cookies and collects no personal data. What it records is anonymous and added together: page views, the country a visit came from, the page that sent it and the kind of browser. None of that identifies you, none of it becomes a profile, and none of it is passed on for advertising.

The script is served from this site's own address. The request that forwards it removes your cookies first, and any copy of the site that is not the live one, a preview or a local build, gets a tracker that records nothing.

Advertising

None. No ad script loads here, no ad network is contacted, and nothing sets an advertising cookie or reads a device identifier. If that ever changes, this page will name the network and say what it stores before the first ad appears.

Hosting

The pages and the server that keeps a room in step both run on Cloudflare. As any host does, Cloudflare handles technical details such as your IP address to deliver the pages and to protect the service from abuse, under its own terms and privacy policy.

Children

These boards are for a general audience and the site is not aimed at young children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anybody, whatever their age.

Your rights

We hold next to nothing personal about you, so there is little to request, correct or delete. What sits in your browser is yours to clear at any time, and a room clears itself. If you want to ask about any of it, write to us.

When this page changes

If the way the site handles data changes, this page changes with it, and so does the date under the heading. The version here is the one in force.

Contact

A question about privacy? Write to [email protected].