How we work

Spark & Whetstone is a free-forever, nonprofit commons. No ads. No tracking. No feed. No data sold, ever.

What is always free — for everyone

Everything that matters is free and always will be:

• Today's puzzle
• Every game and puzzle, and unlimited review of your own games
• Every course and every lesson, including the printable guidebooks
• Rooms to play with the people you know
• The Library
• Everything saved on your device, and the ability to delete it

Optional Patron membership

If you want to help keep the commons going, you can become a Patron. A Patron only ever has things that are additional, never things that are withheld — printed guidebooks at cost, club organiser tools, a name in the annual report. The test for any Patron perk: would a non-patron lose a learning or play capability? If yes, it is not a perk. Patronage is web-first through our fiscal sponsor. More about becoming a Patron →

What we will not claim

We will never tell you a game makes you smarter, protects your memory, or lowers your "brain age." We have no evidence that our games do that, and we will not imply it. Nor will we sell you fear of getting older. We build good games and honest courses; the joy is the point.

What we count

We count learning, never minutes: lessons you've said back in your own words, games you finished. Those counts live on your device and are shown only to you on Your learning. Once a year we publish a transparency report.

On a phone or tablet

On an iPhone or iPad, add any page here to your Home Screen (Share → Add to Home Screen) and it opens like an app, full screen, with nothing installed and nothing to update.

Privacy

No accounts, no cookies. We count page views with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which does not identify you. What the site remembers stays on your device. See exactly what, and how to remove it.

Licences

Our code is Apache-2.0. Courses, guidebooks and printables are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Puzzle and game data is CC BY 4.0. The historical games are public domain, and the commentary on them is our own.

The chess pieces are the Cburnett set by Colin M.L. Burnett, used under the 3-clause BSD License: the same set the GambitTales board on Spark & Anvil uses. Copyright (c) Colin M.L. Burnett; redistribution and use are permitted on the licence's conditions, and the set comes with no warranty.