Privacy Policy

Last updated: 28 May 2026

Board Game Clubs is a free, community-maintained directory. We’ve designed the site to collect as little information about you as possible.

The short version

• We don’t ask you to create an account.
• We don’t use cookies for tracking or advertising.
• We don’t sell, share, or rent any data.
• We use a privacy-friendly analytics tool that doesn’t identify individual visitors.
• Some features (postcode search, “use my location”) send data to third-party services only when you choose to use them.

What we collect

Anonymous usage statistics

We use GoatCounter to count visits to the site. GoatCounter is an open-source, privacy-friendly analytics service that:

• Does not use cookies.
• Does not collect or store IP addresses (only a temporary salted hash, used to de-duplicate page views, which is rotated daily).
• Does not track you across other websites.
• Does not sell or share data.

What we see: anonymised counts of which pages were viewed, referrers, and rough device/browser categories.

You can read GoatCounter’s privacy policy for full details.

Server logs

The site is hosted on GitHub Pages. GitHub may collect basic web server logs (such as IP addresses and request timestamps) for abuse prevention and security. See GitHub’s Privacy Statement for details.

Optional features that involve third parties

The following features only run when you choose to use them.

Postcode search

When you type a postcode into the search box on the UK pages, we send it to postcodes.io to look up the coordinates so we can sort clubs by distance from you. postcodes.io is an open-data service operated by Ideal Postcodes. On the German pages we use Nominatim, the OpenStreetMap geocoding service, to look up German postal codes (PLZ) the same way. We do not store the postcode on our servers.

“Use my location”

If you click “Use my location”, your browser asks for your permission and (if granted) provides your approximate coordinates to the page so we can sort clubs by distance. Your location is used only in your browser — it is not sent to our servers or any third party. It is cleared when you close or reload the page.

Map tiles

The map is rendered using map tiles from CARTO and data from OpenStreetMap. When the map loads, your browser requests tile images directly from CARTO, which may log standard web request information. See the CARTO privacy notice and the OpenStreetMap privacy policy.

Embedded fonts and scripts

The site loads a small number of third-party assets directly from CDNs (Google Fonts for typography, unpkg for map and icon libraries). Your browser will make standard HTTP requests to these services when loading the page.

Children

The site is a public directory and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect any information from children.

Changes to this policy

If we change how the site handles data, we’ll update this page and bump the “last updated” date at the top.

Contact

The site is run by volunteers. If you have a question about privacy, please open an issue on GitHub or reach out via the contribute page.