How Local High Scores Work

Every score on this site is stored in your own browser and goes nowhere else. There is no account, no server and no global ranking - which has some real advantages and one obvious limitation, and both are worth being clear about.

What is actually stored

Five things, all in localStorage, all under a 'fa:' prefix so that they never collide with anything else on a shared origin.

Your favourites, as a list of game ids. Your recently played games. Your preferences, such as whether sound is muted. A personal best per game. And a local play count per game.

The personal best is per-game and its shape is decided by the game itself, so it only ever contains figures that game actually measures - a score, an accuracy, a longest combo, a level reached, a time.

That is the complete list. There is no identifier, no profile and nothing that describes you rather than your play.

• fa:favourites - the games you have starred.
• fa:recent - what you have played lately.
• fa:prefs - settings such as sound.
• fa:best:<game> - your personal best for that game.
• fa:plays - how many times you have played each game, in this browser.

Why there is no global leaderboard

Because this is a static site. There is no server, no database and nothing receiving your scores - so a global ranking would have to be either fictional or backed by infrastructure that does not exist here.

Inventing one would be straightforward and dishonest. A leaderboard showing plausible names and plausible scores is a fabrication, and the fact that it would be a common one does not make it less so.

So the site does not have one, and says so rather than implying that the feature is coming. Your best score is your best score, which is a smaller claim and a true one.

The same reasoning applies to player counts and ratings. Nothing on this site displays how many people have played a game globally, because the site has no way to know.

What the play count actually counts

It counts times you have started a game in this browser, and nothing else.

That is worth stating because a 'popular games' page could easily be read as a global ranking. Here, the popular page separates two things: editorial picks, which are a person's opinion, and your own play counts, which are yours and were counted locally.

Neither is a claim about what other people play. If you have played Wizard Run eleven times, the site knows that because it happened in this browser - and it knows nothing whatsoever about anyone else.

On a fresh browser the personal section is simply empty, which is the honest display of having no data.

What happens when storage is unavailable

It is checked once at startup with a write probe, and if it fails, everything carries on without persistence.

In private browsing, with site data blocked, or if the quota fills mid-session, reads return a fallback and writes fail quietly. No error is shown and no feature breaks - you simply do not keep a best score between sessions.

That design decision is worth noticing because the alternative is common and bad: a site that throws an error or refuses to work when localStorage is unavailable is treating a privacy setting as a fault.

Every read is also wrapped so that corrupted or unparseable data returns the fallback rather than breaking the page. Clearing site data is always safe.

The limitations, stated plainly

Your scores do not follow you. A different browser, a different device or a cleared cache means starting from nothing, and there is no way to recover them because no copy exists anywhere else.

They also cannot be verified, which is the flip side of their being yours. Nothing stops a score in localStorage from being edited, and the site has no opinion about that - it is your browser and your number.

And they cannot be compared. If you want to know whether your Wizard Run score is good, the site cannot tell you, because it has no basis for the comparison.

Those are real costs. They are accepted in exchange for a site that needs no account, sets no cookies, runs no analytics and sends nothing anywhere.

Making local scores useful anyway

A personal best is a comparison against yourself over time, which is arguably the more useful comparison in a skill game.

The games that record more than a score make this better. An accuracy figure or a longest combo tells you something a total does not - two runs with identical scores and very different accuracies were played differently, and that difference is where improvement lives.

It is worth checking those secondary figures after a session rather than only the headline number. A score that stayed flat while accuracy rose is progress that the score has not caught up with yet.

And the recently-played list is more useful than it looks as a practice log. If you are trying to improve at one thing, it shows you honestly whether you have been doing that or drifting between games.

What the site does not store, and why that is the point

It is worth stating the negative list, because it is longer than the positive one and it is what the positive one is buying.

No cookies are set by this site at all - not for analytics, not for preferences, not for anything. Preferences live in localStorage, which is a different mechanism and is never transmitted with a request.

There is no analytics package installed, so page views are not counted, sessions are not tracked and no third party receives anything about your visit. There are no accounts, so there is nothing to log in to and no record of you anywhere.

The privacy and cookie pages on this site describe exactly that, rather than describing a generic set of technologies the site might plausibly use. If any of it changes, those pages change in the same commit.

Frequently asked questions