The short version. Court Piece is a card game made by MaxVerse Lab for a family to play together. It has no adverts, no trackers, and nothing about you is sold or shared with anybody. The server counts finished Games — how many, in which mode, how long — and there is nothing on those rows that says who played. You can play the whole game without an account.
Playing as a guest
The default. Your name, the avatar you pick and, if you choose one, your photo are kept on your own phone. So are your language, your sound setting, your own counters (Games played, won, Sar made), your gems and whatever you chose with them in the Dukaan — card backs, felts, faces; nothing in it costs money.
While you are at a table, the three other players in that room see your name, your avatar and your photo — that is the point of them. The server holds the room while it is being played and then forgets it: a room is deleted six hours after it goes quiet, and two minutes after the last person leaves a Game in progress. Nothing about a guest outlives the room.
If you sign in with Google
Signing in is optional and adds one thing: friends. Your account is handled by Clerk, which holds what Google gives it — your name, your email address and your profile picture. Our own server never receives your email address. It receives a signed token, checks it, and keeps only the account id inside it.
Against that id, the server keeps what the friends feature needs:
- your friend code, and the name, avatar and photo you show to friends;
- your friends, and friend requests you have sent or received;
- whether you are online and whether you are at a table, so a friend can join you;
- your lifetime counters: Games played, Games won, Sar made, Courts;
- your rank, and the last 25 finished Games it was counted from — when, which mode, who won;
- this week's line on your friends' board: points, Games, wins;
- your gems, the day you last collected the daily reward, and what you chose in the Dukaan;
- people you have blocked, so that their requests never reach you;
- if you allowed notifications on the Android app, the address Google gave that phone for them (the next section).
Signing out stops all of it. Ask and the account and everything above is deleted.
Notifications when the app is closed
Only the Android app does this, only if you signed in, and only if you said yes when it asked. When you do, Google's messaging service (Firebase Cloud Messaging) gives your phone an address — a long token that stands for the app on that one phone. The app sends it to your account and the server keeps it, up to five phones per account, and shows it to nobody. It is used for one thing: when a friend calls you to a table or sends you a request while the app is closed, the server hands Google that one message for that phone. Google delivers it and, as the carrier, sees it go by. Nothing is sent while the app is open, and nothing else is ever sent this way.
Switch notifications off for Court Piece in Android's settings and the address is no longer used; delete the account and it is deleted with it. A guest is never asked, and has none.
Your photo
If you pick one, the app shrinks it on your phone to a small square and sends it only to the players of the room you are in, and to the friends you have added. It is not stored anywhere else and it is never shown to anyone outside a room you joined.
Who else is involved
- Cloudflare hosts the site, the game server and the Android file. Like any web host it sees the requests that reach it.
- Clerk handles sign-in, and only if you sign in.
- Google is involved when you choose to sign in with a Google account, when a notification is delivered to a phone with the app closed (Firebase Cloud Messaging, above), and Google Fonts serves the typefaces on these pages.
There is no analytics service, no advertising, and no third party is given anything about you.
What the server counts
When a Game finishes, the server writes one line for itself: the time, which mode it was, which bot level if there were bots, how many people and how many bots were at the table, which Game of that sitting it was, how it ended and how long it took.
There is no name, account, phone or address on that line, and no way to join two of them up to a person — so there is nothing in it that is about you. It is there so we can see whether the game is worth playing twice, and it is kept for 30 days and then deleted. Nobody outside MaxVerse Lab sees it.
What this deliberately does not do is follow anybody from day to day. Knowing whether the same person came back tomorrow would need something on your phone that says it is the same phone, and these rows carry no such thing. The one thing that does name a phone — the notification address above — belongs to a signed-in account, is never written on a Game, and a guest has none.
Children
The game is made for a family and children play it. It asks for nothing beyond a name, and needs no account at all. Whoever looks after a child can play as a guest and nothing is kept off the phone.
Deleting your account
In the app: Settings → Delete account. It goes at once and it does not come back — the friend code, the profile, the friends, the requests, the counters, your entry in other people's lists, and the sign-in account itself. It wipes that phone too.
Without the app installed, or to see what is held about your account first, write to info@maxverselab.com. The whole of it is written out here.
Changes
If what the app keeps ever changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves.