Privacy
No account, ever. Here is everything that is kept, and where.
There are no accounts, no tracking, no advertising, and no analytics beyond a running count of hands and games played. Nothing about you is collected, sold, or shared, and there is nobody to sign in as. Online play works without any of it, which is unusual enough to be worth saying twice. Two things leave your device without being asked and only two — that running count, and a note about the fault itself if the app breaks. Both are explained below, and neither is about you.
On your device
Your name, your face, the table theme, the play aids, your preferred house rules, the tables you have saved and the record of who you have partnered with are all kept in your browser's own storage — on your phone or computer and nowhere else. Clearing your browser data or uninstalling the app erases them, and that is the end of it.
Your device also makes itself an id: a random string, generated once, kept locally. It is sent to the table relay for exactly one purpose — if your signal drops mid-hand, it is how you get your own chair back instead of somebody else's. It is not a login, there is nothing to log in to, and it means nothing away from the table you are sitting at.
While you are playing online
Playing against the bots involves no network at all. Playing with other people needs a server to pass the moves between you, and that server holds a table while the table exists:
- which chair each person is in, the name and face they chose, and their device id;
- the bones played, so somebody who drops can be handed the hand back as it stands;
- anything said in table chat, and the table's name if it was given one;
- the results of hands played at that table.
It is a hand, not a history. A hand that nobody touches for five minutes is cleared, and the table itself is deleted a fortnight after the last word said at it. Nothing is written down anywhere else, nothing is linked to you between tables, and none of it is looked at by us.
Chat
Tables have chat: a row of quick phrases and a box to type in. Whatever is typed goes to the other three people at that table and is held with the table until it expires. You can mute anybody, which takes their lines off your screen for as long as the table lasts and tells them nothing; and whoever opened the table can switch chat off entirely for everyone.
There is no way to reach a player away from a table, no friends list, no messages, and no way to find somebody again afterwards. A table code is the whole of it, and codes are not listed anywhere — the only way to get one is for somebody to send it to you.
Where it runs
The site is hosted by Netlify and the table relay runs on Cloudflare. Like any host, both keep standard technical logs of connections — IP addresses and timestamps — which is how the internet works and is outside our control. We do not read, analyse or retain them. Once the app has loaded it runs on your device, and against the bots it works with no connection at all.
Tips
Leaving a tip opens Stripe's payment page in a new tab. Stripe takes the payment and we never see your card number; what Stripe keeps about a payment is covered by Stripe's own privacy policy, not this one. Nothing about a tip is tied to your play, the app sends nothing to Stripe on its own, and there is no Stripe code inside the app — it is a link out and nothing more.
The feedback button
Tapping Feedback opens your own email program with a message already written, including your screen size and current theme, which is what makes a layout complaint fixable. Nothing is sent unless you send it, and deleting those details before you do is entirely fine. Mail reaches txbonesgame@gmail.com and is used for nothing but answering you.
At the end of a hand you can open Hand/AI Insights & Troubleshooting and send us feedback. What goes: the hand's record — who played what, and the reasons the bots give for their plays — your words, the app's version and the size of your screen. Nothing about you: no name, no account, no device id, no location. Reports go to the table relay's box and are read by a person and by the app's AI helper, which replays the hand to see what the bots did. They are not published and not sold, and they are deleted from the relay once they have been read.
When the app breaks
This is the one thing the app sends without being asked, so here is exactly what it is. If the app hits a fault — a screen that will not draw, something that stops working mid-hand — it sends us a note about the fault itself: the error, where in the app's own code it happened, which version and build you were running, the size of your screen, and the hand it happened in, so we can deal the same hand here and watch it break.
The hand goes up with the chairs named south, west, north and east — not by your name, not by the names you gave the bots, and not by the names of anybody you were playing with. Nothing else about you goes either: no name, no account, no device id, no location, and nothing you have typed. Identical faults are counted together, so a bug that hits a thousand people is one entry here reading a thousand rather than a thousand entries.
It is limited on purpose — one note per fault, a handful per visit — so that something badly broken cannot turn into a flood. And you can turn it off: Profile → Tell us when the app breaks. It starts switched on, because a fault nobody reports is a fault we never fix, and it takes one tap to switch off.
What we do not do
- No advertising, and no advertising software of any kind.
- No analytics, tracking pixels or fingerprinting. The running count below and a note when the app breaks are the whole of what is sent, and neither is about anyone.
- No cookies used to identify or follow you.
- No accounts, logins, email addresses or passwords.
- No selling or sharing — there is nothing to sell.
- No location, contacts, camera, microphone or photo access.
Children
Texas Bones is suitable for all ages and collects nothing from anybody, children included. There is nothing to buy. The one thing worth knowing before handing a child a table code: tables have chat, and the people at a table are whoever was sent the code. Playing the bots involves no other people at all, and the person who opens a table can turn its chat off.
When this changes
This page is updated when the app changes, and the commitments that will not change are the ones above: no advertising, no tracking, no accounts, and nothing about anyone sold or shared.
In the interest of being straight about it: an earlier version of this page said online play would need accounts and a server holding your information, and promised this page would be updated before that shipped. Online play shipped without accounts, which is better than what was promised — but the page was not updated at the time, and that was wrong. It is now.
The count
One number leaves your device, and here is all of it. When a hand finishes, a game is won or a trick is taken, your phone adds one to a tally it keeps for that game — Texas 42, Fives, Moon or Taroky — and, when it has a signal, sends whatever it has not yet sent to the table relay, which adds it to one total for everybody. What goes over the wire is the name of the game and three small numbers. Not your name, not the device's id, not where you were or when, not which bones you held, and nothing that could tell your count from anybody else's once it has landed. The total is on the Game Stats page, beside your own device's count, which stays on the device like everything else. A phone with no signal at the table counts anyway and sends later. If any of that ever changes, this paragraph changes first.
Questions
Email txbonesgame@gmail.com.
← Back to the gameLast updated September 2026.