What this game shares, in plain words
There are no accounts and there is no chat server: messages travel encrypted from player to player, and we don’t store them. Some things still leave your device. This page lists them and says who can see them.
What stays on your device
You never sign up for anything. Your name, colour, last position, the way you were facing and your settings (solo or online, hide players’ chat) are kept only in your own browser, in its localStorage, so you can pick up where you left off. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes them.
Playing solo
Solo is the default: just you and the game’s own townsfolk. No other player can see or hear you. Your device still talks to a few outside services to draw the world:
- Map imagery and street labels for the area you are looking at, from Esri and OpenFreeMap.
- Place names. Rounded coordinates go to a place-name service (Photon, run by komoot) to show where you are, and whatever you type into the place search goes there too.
Like any web request, these reveal your IP address to those services, and roughly where on the map you are looking. The same goes for the host that serves these pages.
Playing online
Online is something you switch on, and it is for adults (18+). When it is on:
- Your device finds nearby players through public relay servers run by volunteers (Nostr relays, with WebTorrent trackers as a fallback).
- It then connects to other players’ devices (WebRTC). The connection is encrypted from your device to theirs.
- Other players’ devices receive your name, your colour and your avatar’s position in the game world.
- Your IP address. When this site’s private relay is switched on, your device connects to other players through Cloudflare’s TURN relay, which passes the encrypted traffic on without being able to read it, and other players see only the relay’s address. When the relay is off or can’t be reached, your device connects to theirs directly (using Cloudflare and Google STUN servers to set that up), and the players you connect to can see your IP address. When a direct connection isn’t possible (common on mobile data), the connection goes through a relay run by ExpressTURN instead; ExpressTURN then sees your IP address but cannot read the encrypted traffic. Either way, the volunteer relays that introduce players to each other see it. Go solo if you don’t want any of this.
Chat
Chat lines go to players within about 5 miles of your avatar and show for 5 seconds. We don’t store them, so there is nothing for us to look up afterwards.
Two honest limits: nothing technically stops another player’s device from recording what it receives, and the 5-mile reach is applied by each player’s app rather than enforced by a server.
Chat is unmoderated. Nobody is reviewing what people say.
“Near me” and your location
If you choose “Near me”, your browser asks for your location and the game starts you at a coarse point in your area, within a mile or two, not at your exact spot.
If you also tick “Use my exact spot”, the game starts you exactly where your device says you are. When you play online, nearby players then see where you really are. The box is unticked again every time you open the game.
After that, your avatar is wherever you walk it, and online players near it can see it. So don’t walk it to your front door.
Staying in control
- Mute one player by tapping their avatar.
- Hide all players’ chat from the people button at the top of the screen.
- Go solo at any time from the same place. Your device disconnects from other players.
Muting and hiding happen on your own device. The other player is not told, and a player you mute can still see your avatar and your chat.
Contact
To report a problem with the game or with this page, write to CONTACT_EMAIL_PLACEHOLDER.
Because chat is not stored, we cannot look up what somebody said to you. If someone is bothering you, mute them or go solo.