Privacy Policy

What Antics never asks for

No account, no password, no email address, no phone number, no date of birth. You can play every game on this site without identifying yourself in any way, and there is no sign-up flow anywhere to change that.

The games themselves store nothing

Almost every game here runs entirely inside your browser. The names you type into a wheel, a name picker or a team generator are never sent anywhere. They exist in the page you are looking at and disappear when you close the tab.

When you share a wheel or a team split with a link, the contents are encoded into the link itself rather than saved on a server. That is why those links are long. Anyone holding the link can read what is in it, so treat a shared link as public.

The two features that do store something

Secret Santa draws. A draw has to remember who drew whom, or the game does not work, so the participant names, any exclusions, the budget and any wishlists are stored on our hosting provider’s database. They are reachable only through the unguessable link created with the draw. Draws are deleted automatically 150 days after they are created.

Sealed raffles. Sealing a raffle commits the entry list before the draw happens, which is the entire point of the feature, so the entry names, prize names and the result are stored and reachable through the raffle’s link. Sealed raffles are deleted automatically 120 days after creation. An ordinary raffle draw is not stored at all; it runs in your browser like the other tools.

Party rooms. A room has to hold the same state for everybody in it, so the party name, the nicknames people pick, the answers they type and the running scores are stored while the room is open. Nobody is asked for a real name and no email address is involved. A room and everything in it is deleted automatically about a day after it was opened, and there is nothing to log into and nothing left afterwards to delete.

Only put names in these that you are comfortable sharing with everyone who has the link. Real names are the normal case for a gift exchange, but nothing else about a person is needed and nothing else should be entered. In a party room the names go on a screen the whole room is looking at, so treat that screen as public.

If you buy a party pass

This is the only thing on the site that costs money and the only reason we would ever hold an email address. Payment is handled entirely by Stripe, who take the card details on their own checkout page. We never see a card number, and none of it passes through this site.

What we keep is the pass itself: the email address you gave at checkout, what was bought, and which room it later opened. The address is there so the link to your room can be sent to you and found again if you lose it, and it is used for nothing else: no newsletter, no marketing, and it is never passed to anyone. A pass is deleted automatically 180 days after it is bought.

Stripe keeps its own record of the payment, as any payment processor must, and that is covered by their policy rather than by this one.

Analytics

Antics uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits and to see which games get played and which get abandoned. That is what decides what gets built next, and on a site with no sign-ups it is the only feedback there is.

What is recorded is deliberately narrow: which game was started, which category chips were turned on, how many questions a group got through, when a scored round ended, and whether a second game was opened in the same visit. No text you type is ever sent, and no game content leaves your browser.

Google Analytics sets its own cookies and processes your IP address to derive an approximate location; it does not receive your name or email, because we do not have them. You can block it with any tracker-blocking extension or a browser setting and every game on this site will work exactly the same.

Local storage on your device

Some pages remember small preferences on your own device, for example which names you have already claimed in a Secret Santa draw, so a refresh does not lose them. This never leaves your device and is cleared when you clear your browser data.

Advertising

Antics is paid for by advertising, and the ads are served by Journey by Mediavine. That is why every game here is free and why none of them asks you to sign up.

Journey by Mediavine and the advertisers it works with set their own cookies and read identifiers from your device, in order to choose which ads to show you and to check whether they were seen. That happens between you and them. Antics sends them nothing about you, because it holds nothing to send: no name, no email address, and none of the text you type into a game. What they collect is theirs and is covered by their own privacy policy rather than by this one.

In the UK and the EU you are asked before any of that starts, and you can change or withdraw that choice at any time from the same panel. Saying no costs you nothing here: every game on this site works identically either way.

Two rules about where ads go, which are promises rather than defaults. An ad is never placed between a tap and the result it produces, because a mis-tap that happens to earn money is a bad reason to design a screen badly. And no ad ever appears on the host screen, the one being cast to a television or shared into a meeting.

Children

Several games here are written for families and classrooms, and children play them. Antics does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, of any age, because it does not collect personal information at all. Nothing on this site asks a child for a name, an email address or a photograph.

Your rights over your data

If you are in the UK, EU or California you have rights to access, correct and delete personal data held about you. In practice there is almost nothing to exercise them against: no account exists and no profile is built. If you created a Secret Santa draw or a sealed raffle and want it deleted before its expiry, send the link to the address below and it will be removed. The same goes for a party pass and the email address attached to it, with one caveat worth stating: deleting an unused pass deletes the thing you paid for, so ask for a refund instead and it goes with it.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a deletion request, go to hello@playantics.com.