About PlayNook

What this is

PlayNook is a small collection of games that run in the browser — board games that have been played for centuries alongside arcade games that were new in the eighties. Each one loads as a single page and starts immediately.

The catalogue is sorted into 5 groups:

• Board Games
• Dice Games
• Puzzle Games
• Math & Logic
• Retro & Arcade

What we leave out

There is no account, no newsletter and no paid tier. No adverts run on the pages themselves, and we keep no analytics — no visitor counts, no heat maps, nothing about where you clicked. The one thing loaded from elsewhere is Google’s advertising tag, which tells us whether the advertising we pay for reaches anybody — and which only sets a cookie once you accept it in the banner; the privacy page says exactly what it does either way.

This is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. A game of Mancala does not need to know who you are. Our privacy policy describes the one thing that is recorded — server log files, deleted after 14 days — and our cookie policy explains the settings the games keep on your own device.

Writing about the games

Alongside the games we publish 62 long guides to the classics: where a game came from, how every rule works, and the ideas that actually decide games. They are written for someone who wants to get better, not for someone who wants a rules summary — most of those exist already, and most are wrong about at least one regional variant.

Start with the articles if that sounds useful.

Tools

Chess players have had position editors for decades; for draughts the tooling is scattered. So we built our own and made it public. The Board Diagram Studio lets you set up a position, draw a move on it, and export the result as an image or share it as a link — free, without an account, and with the diagrams yours to use however you like.

Who runs it

PlayNook is operated by Compu Global Hyper Meganet UG in Mühlhausen, Germany. Full company details are in the imprint.

If something is broken, or a rule contradicts the way you learned the game, we would rather know: hello@playnook.io. More ways to reach us on the contact page.