Lamplight Tavern

Thirty games the world put down.

Senet · Hnefatafl · Bao · Toguz Kumalak · and twenty-six more

A quiet corner where thirty traditional board games — some four thousand years old, most of them long out of fashion — are set out and ready to play against the innkeeper. No accounts. No advertising. No network of any kind: once it is on your phone it never talks to anything, so it works on a train, on a plane, and in a cellar.

What is on the shelf

How it plays

Each game has the innkeeper as an opponent at three strengths, or a second player at the same table. Every board carries its own rules, written out plainly, and the app explains a move it will not let you make rather than simply refusing it. There is one nightly challenge, the same for everyone, drawn fresh each evening.

It speaks English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Hindi. The names of the games themselves stay as they are in every language, because that is what they are called.

What it does not do

It collects nothing and sends nothing. There is no analytics library, no advertising identifier, no crash reporter and no account. Your progress — wins, draws, streaks, the language you chose — is written to your own device and stays there; deleting the app deletes all of it. The full detail is in the app's privacy policy.

This website is the same kind of thing: no cookies, no analytics, and not one byte loaded from anybody else — even the typefaces are served from this domain. What a web server unavoidably writes down is set out in the website privacy policy.

Getting it

Lamplight Tavern is coming to the App Store. The app's own page carries the details, the privacy policy and the support page — and will carry the link the moment there is one.

Questions

The support page answers the ones that come up most, including what to do if a purchase does not restore. Anything else, write to support@lamplight-tavern.app.