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Privacy Policy

Last updated 22 July 2026

Rookspell is a small, independent game. It has no accounts, no adverts, no analytics and no tracking. Almost everything it knows about you stays on your own computer.

01Who this policy is from

This policy covers the Rookspell game and this website at 8bitblock.github.io/Rookspell. Rookspell is developed and published by an independent developer trading as 8bitblock ("we", "us").

It does not cover Valve's Steam platform, GitHub's hosting, or any third-party service you reach by following a link from here. Those are governed by their own privacy policies, which are linked in the relevant sections below.

02What the game stores on your computer

Rookspell writes a small number of files to the standard save location for your operating system. These files stay on your machine. They are not uploaded to us, and we have no way to read them.

• Settings — audio levels, animation level, rules variant, key and controller bindings, and display preferences.
• Card collection — which spells you have discovered, and how many times you have played each one.
• Constructed spellbooks — any custom draw pool you build for offline matches.
• Progress counters — the totals behind achievements, such as games won and cards collected.

Deleting the game's save folder erases all of it. If Steam Cloud is enabled for your copy of the game, Steam may also keep a synchronised copy of these files against your Steam account so your progress follows you between machines; that copy is held by Valve under Steam's own policy, and you can turn Cloud syncing off in the game's Steam properties.

03What Steam handles

Rookspell is distributed through Steam and uses Valve's Steamworks services for the features that need a network. When you use those features, Valve processes the data required to run them. This includes:

• Your Steam ID and profile name, so the game can show who is in a lobby and who you are playing against.
• Achievements and statistics, which are recorded against your Steam account and displayed on your Steam profile according to your own Steam privacy settings.
• Your friends list, read only while you are inviting someone to a game, so the invite dialog can show who is online.

We receive only what Steam exposes to the running game — principally a Steam ID and display name for the people in your match. We do not copy that anywhere, and we keep no server-side record of your play. Valve's handling of your data is described in the Steam Privacy Policy.

Purchases are made entirely through Steam. We never see your payment details, billing address or email address.

04Online multiplayer

Online games are peer-to-peer and are brokered by Steam's networking. Connections are established through Valve's relay infrastructure rather than by handing your address to the other player.

While you are in a lobby, the following is visible to the other people in that lobby: your Steam profile name and avatar, and the match settings chosen by the host. Game traffic itself is the moves, spells and clock updates needed to keep both sides of the board in step.

We do not run game servers, we do not log matches, and there is no chat system in the game, so there is no message history to store. A host can remove or block a player from their own lobby; that block is stored in the lobby's data on Steam for the life of that lobby and is not shared with us or retained afterwards.

05Steam Workshop

Rookspell supports Steam Workshop packs, which can add cosmetic skins and custom cards. Subscribing to a pack, or publishing one from the in-game uploader, is a transaction between you and Steam: Valve hosts the files and records the association with your Steam account.

If you publish a pack, the title, description, preview image and contents you upload become publicly visible on Steam alongside your Steam profile, as with any Workshop item. Do not put anything in a pack that you would not want to be public.

06This website

This site is a set of static files. It sets no cookies, includes no analytics, and has no contact forms, comment sections or sign-ups.

• Hosting. The site is served by GitHub Pages. Like any web host, GitHub receives your IP address and browser user-agent in order to deliver the page, and may retain those request logs for security purposes. See the GitHub Privacy Statement and their notes on GitHub Pages data collection.
• Fonts. The page loads typefaces from Google Fonts. Your browser makes a request to Google's servers to fetch them, which necessarily reveals your IP address to Google. See the Google Fonts privacy FAQ.
• Local storage. The spellbook page remembers one thing in your browser's local storage: whether you asked to hide card text to avoid spoilers. It is a single yes-or-no value, it never leaves your browser, and clearing your site data removes it.

07What we never collect

To be explicit, neither the game nor this website does any of the following:

• No analytics or telemetry SDKs, and no crash-reporting service that phones home.
• No advertising, ad identifiers, or third-party trackers.
• No account system of our own, and no email list.
• No access to your files, microphone, camera, contacts or location.
• No selling or sharing of personal data. There is nothing to sell.

08Children

Rookspell is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. Access to Steam is governed by Valve's own age requirements and the Steam Subscriber Agreement. If you believe a child has provided personal data through a feature of our game, please get in touch and we will look into it.

09Your rights and choices

Depending on where you live, you may have rights over your personal data — including the right to access it, correct it, delete it, or object to its processing. Because we hold no personal data about you on any server of ours, most such requests are best directed at the service that actually holds the data:

• Game progress and settings — held on your own computer. Delete the save folder, or use the in-game options, and it is gone.
• Steam account data, achievements, Cloud saves and Workshop items — held by Valve. Manage these through your Steam privacy settings, or contact Valve directly.
• Website request logs — held by GitHub as our host.

You can also opt out of individual features rather than the game: play offline to avoid multiplayer entirely, disable Steam Cloud in the game's Steam properties, and simply not subscribe to Workshop packs. None of these choices reduce what the base game does.

If you do believe we hold data about you, contact us using the details below and we will respond as promptly as we reasonably can.

10Changes to this policy

If the game gains a feature that changes what data is handled, this page will be updated and the date at the top will change with it. Because the site is open source, the full revision history of this document is public in the site repository. Significant changes will also be noted on the Steam page.

11Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything the game does with data, are welcome.

• Steam — post in the Rookspell Community discussions.
• GitHub — open an issue on the Rookspell repository.

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