For schools, libraries and museums

What a child gives us
A team name.

No email, no password, no date of birth, no location. A child types a team name and plays. This page says what is stored, how long it stays, and what somebody has to be able to do to take part.

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  • No accounts for children
  • No location stored
  • No ads, nothing sold

What is stored

All of it, on one screen. There is no fourth card.

A team name

The one thing a child types, up to 30 characters. It appears on that trail's leaderboard, which anyone with the trail's link can read. If full names are a problem for you, say so when the teams are named — we cannot tell a nickname from a surname.

What they found, and when

Which codes that team has collected, the coins they carry, and the times. That is the game. It is attached to the team name, not to a person.

Nothing else

No email address, no password, no age, no school, no photograph, no contacts, no microphone. A guest team is a name and a score.

What we do not collect

Not settings you have to switch on. This is how a guest team works by default, and it is the way every child reaches a trail.

  • No email address. A guest team has none at all — not even a placeholder one.
  • No password for a child to remember or an adult to reset.
  • No IP address stored against a child's play. Guest teams are left out of sign-in tracking on purpose.
  • No coordinates. Nothing writes a child's position into our database.
  • No advertising, no profiling, and nothing sold or shared for marketing.

How long it is kept

Deleting a team deletes everything attached to it — the name, the score, every code it found.

When the trail is archived

Archiving a finished trail deletes every guest team on it. This is an organizer pressing a button, not a clock running out — so if your policy needs a fixed window, tell us the number and we will run your trail to it.

Every night, if you want

A trail that ranks daily clears its board at the hour you choose: guest teams are deleted, and the next day starts empty. Venues running all season use this so nothing accumulates.

Backups

Encrypted database backups are kept for 30 days and then destroyed, so a deleted team can persist in a backup for up to a month before it is gone everywhere.

Location, precisely

This is the question we get asked most, so here is the whole of it. A code can carry a position — the spot where your staff stood when they hid it. That is a record of your venue, not of a visitor.

A trail can also be set to check that a player is actually standing at a code before it counts, which stops a code's link being shared and played from the car park. When it is on, the phone answers one question at the moment of a scan: is this player within the distance you set. The answer is used to allow or refuse that one tap and is then discarded. No coordinates are written down.

The map a player can open shows the codes their own team has already found. It is not a record of where anyone walked.

Who can play, and who cannot

Eggtrail has not been audited against WCAG 2.1, WCAG 2.2 or Section 508, and we do not claim conformance to any of them. What follows is what we know, including the two things that will stop some people playing. If you need a formal audit before you can buy, tell us — we would rather book one than describe one.

What works today

  • No app and no account. It runs in the browser on a phone a family already has.
  • English and Spanish, throughout the game.
  • The board says found and locked in words, not only in colour and symbols.
  • Reduced-motion settings are honoured for the page animations.
  • No time limit at all unless your organizer sets one, and self-paced trails start each team's clock when that team arrives.

What will stop somebody

  • Enemy cards are settled by a short timed tapping game, and it cannot be skipped. In adventure mode the final boss is an enemy card, so a player who cannot make a timed tap cannot finish that trail.
  • Two of the three mini-games need a pointer or a touchscreen. The enemy duel can be played with a keyboard; the other two cannot yet.
  • A code has to be scanned with a camera. There is no code to type in instead, so a player without a working camera needs somebody to scan for them.

All three have the same answer, and it costs you nothing: a trail can be built without the card types that block your group. A collect-and-score trail with no enemies and no mini-games plays start to finish with none of the above — tell us your requirements before we write your story, and that is the trail you get.

Questions procurement asks

No. A child scans the trail's code, types a team name, and is playing. There is no sign-up, no email, no password and no parental consent flow — because there is nothing to consent to. Adults who write and run trails do have accounts, with an email address and a password.

Our web server logs requests the way every web server does, and those logs contain IP addresses for a short period. What we do not do is store an IP against a child's play: guest teams are deliberately excluded from the sign-in tracking that would record one, and there is an automated test that keeps it that way.

No. No coordinates of a player are written to our database at any point. If a trail turns on the standing-at-the-code check, the phone answers a yes-or-no question at the moment of a scan and the answer is discarded. See the section above for the full detail.

By default, none — the game screens load no third-party scripts or stylesheets at all, which is also why a trail keeps working on a museum's guest wifi. Two things can change that, and both are the venue's choice: web analytics if your organizer configures it, and map tiles from OpenStreetMap on the map screen, which we can point at a different provider on request. Card art is served from our own storage.

Archive the trail and every guest team on it is deleted, immediately and permanently. Ask us and we will do it for you, or set your trail to clear its board nightly. Backups are destroyed after 30 days.

No. We have not completed a formal audit and we will not claim a level we have not been assessed against. The section above lists what we know works and the three things we know do not. If a conformance statement is a requirement for your district, talk to us about funding an audit rather than about wording.

Not on their own today. The codes are QR codes and there is no typed alternative yet, so a player without a working camera needs a partner to scan for them. Trails are usually played in pairs or small teams, which is how most groups handle it.

Playing is always free and there is no advertising. Venues and schools that write their own trails pay by invoice for a season. Nobody is charged per child.

Send us the checklist

If your district has a form, we will fill it in. If it has a question this page did not answer, that is the more useful email.

Ask us a policy question