Legal · Cookies

Three cookies, and none of them curious

Last updated: 1 September 2026 Three in total No advertising trackers 18+ only

Most sites open a page like this in order to justify forty of them. We keep three. All are set by this domain, none is used for advertising, and the third appears only if you visit the contact page.

Folded velvet in low light — Velvet in the west corridor. It remembers nothing about you either.

1. What a cookie is

A cookie is a short piece of text that a site asks your browser to keep and to hand back on the next request. Browsers comply without consulting you, which is the entire reason the practice ended up in law rather than in a manual.

What a cookie does is a matter of who set it. It can hold a single preference and nothing else, or it can be the thread by which a stranger stitches your afternoon together across forty unrelated pages. Both are called cookies. Only the first kind is used here.

2. Why the house keeps any

Three reasons, and there is no fourth.

We are required to ask whether you are eighteen. Remembering the answer is the only civil way to avoid asking again at every door.
We are required to ask what you think of cookies. Remembering that answer is the only way to stop the notice reappearing for the rest of your life.
The contact form has to distinguish a message you sent from one that another site tried to send in your name.

None of the three involves knowing who you are. PlayMischief has no accounts, no logins and no profiles, so there is no identity for a cookie to attach itself to in the first place.

3. The three cookies, in full

This is the complete list as the site stands today, taken from the code rather than from a template. All three are first-party: they are set by playmischief.com, read by playmischief.com, and shared with nobody.

pm_age_ok

Records that you answered yes at the door.

CategoryStrictly necessary
Set byplaymischief.com, first party
LifetimeOne year
ContentsThe digit 1

Without it the age question returns on the next page. Answering no writes nothing at all: a refusal leaves no trace on the device, which is precisely why the door is shut again the next time you arrive.

pm_cookie_choice

Records which button you pressed on the cookie notice.

CategoryStrictly necessary
Set byplaymischief.com, first party
LifetimeOne year
ContentsThe word accepted or the word rejected

There is a joke buried in this one that nobody has managed to dig out: remembering that you refused cookies requires a cookie. The alternative is a notice that greets you on every page for ever, which serves nobody.

PHPSESSID

The standard session identifier used by the language this site is written in. It is created on the contact page and nowhere else on playmischief.com.

CategoryStrictly necessary
Set byplaymischief.com, first party
LifetimeUntil the browser is closed
ContentsA random string, meaningless on its own

It ties the form in front of you to a single-use token, so that a page on some other domain cannot quietly post a message under your address. The same session lets the server turn away a duplicate sent seconds after the first, and stops a refresh from delivering your message twice. It holds no personal data of its own.

4. Kept in your browser, never sent to us

Two further things are stored on your device while you play. Neither is a cookie: neither travels with a request, and neither reaches our server at any point, on any page.

pm_wallet_v1, in local storage

Your balance of Glints, the time of your last free allowance, the number of turns you have taken and the best single result you have had. It sits in this browser, on this device, and stays there until something removes it.

That is why a balance does not follow you from a laptop to a phone, and why clearing site data sets it back to 5,000. Losing it costs you nothing whatsoever: the counters were given out free, they hold no monetary value, and there is no ledger anywhere on our side to reconcile them against.

pm_session_start and pm_session_shown, in session storage

Two numbers behind the reminder that interrupts a long sitting. They record when the tab was opened and how many times the reminder has appeared, and the browser discards both the moment the tab closes. The Responsible Social Gaming Policy explains what the reminder is for.

5. What is not set

The absent list is longer than the present one, and rather more informative.

Advertising, retargeting or conversion cookies of any description
Third-party analytics, from any provider, under any name
Social buttons, embedded players, comment widgets or sharing pixels
Cross-site identifiers, device fingerprints, or anything at all sold onward to a data broker
Fonts, scripts, stylesheets or images loaded from somebody else’s domain

The last of those is less a privacy flourish than a matter of housekeeping. Everything this site needs — type, images, scripts, the engraved marks on the reels — is served from playmischief.com, so no outside party is told that you were here, and none of them has to be trusted on your behalf.

Analytics, in the conditional tense.

The notice at the foot of the screen asks about analytics because the answer is better collected before it is needed than after. As this page is written, the house measures nothing: no analytics cookie is placed on playmischief.com, whichever button you pressed. Should that ever change, only visitors who accepted would receive one, this page would be rewritten before a single line of it shipped, and the notice would come round again to ask you afresh.

6. Changing your mind

Your answer is not final and never was. The button below forgets it and brings the notice back, on this page or any other.

Takes effect at once

Essential only keeps the two necessary cookies in place, because without them the age question and the notice itself would greet you on every page you open. Accept all adds nothing at all today, for the reason set out above. Neither answer changes what a room does, what a turn costs or how often the free allowance arrives. Consent here buys us measurement, not you an advantage.

The button needs JavaScript.

With scripts turned off it does nothing, and deleting pm_cookie_choice by hand has exactly the same effect: the notice returns on the next page you open. Every other part of this site — the door, the contact form, the whole of this document — works with scripts disabled.

7. Clearing everything yourself

Your browser is the final authority on all of this and can throw the lot away without consulting us. The wording moves between versions, but the path is roughly the same everywhere.

Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers: Settings, then Privacy and security, then the entry covering site data. Search for the domain and delete it.
Firefox: Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Cookies and Site Data.
Safari: Settings, then Privacy, then Manage Website Data.
On a phone the same options live inside the browser’s own settings rather than the system ones.

Removing site data for playmischief.com clears the two cookies, the session identifier and the stored balance in one gesture. The rooms open again immediately at 5,000 Glints, which is where everyone starts and where nothing of value was ever held. A private or incognito window keeps none of it once the window closes, and is the shortest possible version of this entire page.

8. Questions and revisions

This notice is reviewed whenever the site changes what it stores, and the date at the top of the page moves when it does. There is no archive of earlier versions, because there has been nothing dramatic to archive.

Anything concerning cookies, browser storage or personal data reaches the data controller at [email protected]. Anything else — a room misbehaving, a question about the counters — is better sent to [email protected]. The Privacy Policy sets out what happens to a message once it arrives, and who at Nightjar Play Ltd. is answerable for it.