No account is required to play
Chess Yard does not ask you to provide a name, email address, phone number, password, or payment details, and it has no member database for ordinary games. You can start an AI or same-device game directly in your browser.
Data that stays in your browser
AI and same-device game progress, recently completed games, sound choices, light or dark theme, sidebar state, and some interface preferences are stored in localStorage. For online rooms, localStorage or sessionStorage also holds a random browser identifier, the most recent room, a seat token, and host credentials so that you can recover your seat after refreshing. These values are not your name and do not create an account across websites.
Stockfish and browser caching
AI moves and hints are calculated by Stockfish WebAssembly in your browser. The position is not sent to a cloud chess engine to search for the best move. Your browser may cache the engine, fonts, images, scripts, and offline resources to make later visits load faster.
Data processed by online rooms
When you create or join a room, the room service processes the room code, seats, display names, connection state, moves, draw offers, and game result so that participants’ boards remain synchronized. The public lobby shows a room code, game status, assigned colours, sanitized display names, and spectator count for public rooms. Private rooms are not listed in the public lobby, but anyone with the invitation link or room credentials may still be able to enter.
How long room data is retained
Rooms are short-lived spaces for games, not a permanent game archive. Under the current defaults, a waiting room expires after about 30 minutes; a room with both players offline is removed after about 20 minutes; a finished room is removed after about 10 minutes; and an active game may remain available for up to about 3 hours. Service settings or operating conditions may cause the actual times to vary slightly.
Infrastructure logs
The website and room service are delivered through Cloudflare infrastructure. To serve pages, maintain security, and troubleshoot faults, the hosting provider may process standard technical data such as IP addresses, request times, browser information, and error logs under its own policies.
Cookies, advertising, and analytics
Ordinary play uses no login cookie. The site uses Google Analytics 4 (measurement ID G-8EWY47HNXY) to understand aggregate traffic such as page views, approximate region, device type, browser, and referral source. The same measurement ID is used on the Ply Yard studio site and other Ply Yard game hosts, so Google may treat visits from the same browser across those hostnames as related. Analytics is not used to replay games and is not tied to a player account; advertising storage is denied by default. Cloudflare also injects a Web Analytics script to measure page-load performance at the edge; those beacons go to a same-origin endpoint on this site. Google's privacy policy is at https://policies.google.com/privacy. Blocking analytics does not prevent you from playing.
How to delete or control data
You can clear site data for chess.plyyard.com in your browser settings to remove local games, preferences, and room credentials. You can also use private browsing to reduce persistent storage. Closing a room or waiting for it to expire clears its server-side room state. After local data is cleared, we cannot restore your games or seat.
External links and policy updates
Chess Yard may link to the Ply Yard portal, open-source projects, and licence pages. Once you leave this site, the other operator’s privacy practices are governed by its own policies. This page will be updated if data flows or third-party services change materially. Questions about this privacy notice may be sent to contact@plyyard.com.
