Cookie Policy

You cannot register on Wordgames, so no cookie here is holding a name or an account. What is left is a handful of small files that keep the site working, count visits, and pay for the hosting. This page names each one and tells you how to switch off the parts that are not strictly necessary.

• What a cookie actually is
• The four kinds
• The ones we set
• The ones other companies set
• Games from other studios
• How long they last
• Turning them off
• Doing it in your browser
• Changes

What a cookie actually is

In short: a small text file a website leaves in your browser so it can recognise the same browser next time.

A cookie is a short piece of text stored by your browser. It usually holds an identifier and a date and nothing more. When you come back, the browser hands the same text back to the site that set it, which is how a site remembers that this browser already rated a game.

The same section covers the neighbouring technologies, because they raise exactly the same questions: local storage, which is where your word search progress and your daily streak are kept, and the tiny invisible images and scripts that advertising companies use to count an impression. Where this page says cookies, it means all of them.

The four kinds

In short: strictly necessary, functional, statistics, advertising. Only the first group runs whatever you choose.

Strictly necessary. Without these the site does not work. They protect the contact form from bots and keep a page load in one piece. There is no opt out for these, because switching them off is the same as switching off the site.

Functional. These remember a preference you expressed: that you already rated a game, how far you got in a word search, how many days your streak has run. They are conveniences. Refuse them and the site still works, it just forgets.

Statistics. These count visits and page views so we know which games people actually play. They are the reason we can tell that a game is broken on phones or that a category nobody opens should be rewritten.

Advertising. These are set by the advertising companies that buy space on the site. They limit how often you see the same advert and measure whether an advert did anything. Your browser settings, described at the bottom of this page, are what switch them off.

The ones we set

In short: a rating cookie, and your game progress kept in your own browser.

The rating cookie. When you rate a game we store a small cookie holding that game's number, so the same browser does not count twice. It contains no identifier for you and it is never read by anybody else.

Game progress. Word search boards, finished words and your daily streak live in your browser's local storage. They never reach our server. Clearing your browser data clears them, and there is no backup, because there is no account to back them up to.

The ones other companies set

In short: Google Analytics for counting, Cloudflare Turnstile on the contact form, and the advertising partners whose code runs on the page.

Google Analytics. Counts visits and page views. We read it in aggregate; we never look up an individual. Google's own handling is described in Google's privacy policy, and Google publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of it everywhere at once.

Cloudflare Turnstile. Sits on the contact form and works out whether the thing filling it in is a person. It replaces the puzzles you used to have to solve, and it is strictly necessary in the plain sense that without it the form fills with spam and nobody reads the real messages.

Advertising partners. Advertising space on Wordgames is sold through exchanges, and each of them may set its own cookies. The full list of companies authorised to sell space on this domain is public and machine readable at /ads.txt. We do not control what those companies store, only whether they are allowed on the page at all.

Games from other studios

In short: a game running inside a frame is somebody else's website, and it sets its own cookies under its own policy.

Many of the games here are made and hosted by other studios and load inside a frame on our page. When you play one, your browser is talking to that studio's servers directly. Anything it stores, whether that is your progress in the game or something for its own measurement, is stored under that studio's rules, not ours.

We pick the games and we drop the ones that behave badly, but we cannot inspect or control what runs on somebody else's server. If a game does something that looks wrong, tell us and we will look at it.

How long they last

In short: some disappear when you close the tab, the rest expire on a date, and you can wipe all of them at any moment.

A session cookie lives until you close the browser. A persistent cookie carries an expiry date and survives until then, or until you delete it. Ours are short lived by design: a rating cookie is only useful for as long as the rating it records matters.

A first party cookie is one set by wordgames.com itself. A third party cookie is set by another company whose code runs on the page, which is what analytics and advertising cookies are. The distinction matters because your browser lets you block the second group on its own.

Turning them off

In short: nothing here is required to play, so you can switch off everything except the strictly necessary cookies and the site still works.

Every game on Wordgames plays the same whether you allow statistics and advertising cookies or block them. There is no feature held back, no reminder that comes back every page, and no reduced version of the site for people who refuse.

The controls that actually do the work are your browser's, and the two sections below cover them. Google also publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics on every site at once, and Your Online Choices collects the opt outs for the advertising companies in one place.

Doing it in your browser

In short: every browser can block or clear cookies, and blocking third party cookies alone stops most of the tracking.

In Chrome the setting is under Settings, then Privacy and security, then Third-party cookies. In Firefox it is Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Enhanced Tracking Protection. In Safari it is Settings, then Privacy, on both the Mac and the iPhone. In Edge it is Settings, then Cookies and site permissions.

Blocking everything, including strictly necessary cookies, will break the contact form and will lose your word search progress. Blocking third party cookies alone leaves the site working normally.

Changes

In short: when this page changes, the date at the top changes with it.

Partners come and go and the tools we use change with them, so this page is revised when that happens. We have no address to notify you at, and that is deliberate. The date at the top is the honest record of when this was last touched.