Short, because the game is short. Nine questions at nine, three lives, nothing to pay, and nothing to win but a city's standing for the night.
Last updated 14 September 2026. Playing at nine o'clock means you accept these.
Free to play, and it stays that way
inputresponse has no entry fee and never will. There is nothing to buy, no way to buy an advantage, and no prize that costs anyone money to enter. The game is meant to be paid for by a sponsor and by advertising on the results screen, never in the middle of a round. Neither is running yet: there is no sponsor and no advertising on this site today.
That is not only a promise, it is the design: the moment you charge to enter a game of this shape, it becomes a different kind of product under the law, and it stops being something anyone should be encouraged to play.
Who can play
You need to be 13 or older. One record per person: the game is a city's board of real people, and playing as several people at once is the one thing that would make it meaningless. Local law where you live always comes first — if the game is not lawful where you are, do not play it.
Playing fairly
Play it yourself, in your own browser. Do not use a script or a bot to answer, do not run several identities, do not try to disrupt the server or other players, and do not scrape the question bank. The game already puts a clock and a rate limit in the way of a script, and a city title taken by one will be removed without discussion.
You do not have to prove where you are, and nothing tries to check. What makes a city standing mean something is the bonus question, which is about the city you claimed — so claiming one you do not know only hands the title to somebody who does.
The questions and their answers
Questions come from public statistics, public datasets and questions submitted by players, and every answer shows the authority it came from. Where an answer is genuinely disputed, the question is withdrawn rather than argued about. Even so, the game is a quiz run by one person and not a reference work: it is not a source to cite, and no guarantee is given that every answer is beyond argument.
What a city standing is
Winning a night gives you the city's standing for that night and a place in the record. It is a title and a result, not property and not a prize of any kind. Records can be reset if a result is corrupted or won unfairly, and the game may be changed, suspended or discontinued — if it is ever discontinued, it will be announced on the game page rather than simply going quiet.
Interruptions
Nine o'clock is nine o'clock, and the round starts whether or not you are ready — that is the point of it. But the game is run on a single small server, and it can be interrupted: a restart, a network problem, or something worse at exactly the wrong moment. Where a night is lost this way, the night is not scored. What is not promised is that the service will always be available or free of faults.
Your record and your name
You may set a display name. Do not use one that is somebody else's, that impersonates anyone, or that is unlawful, hateful or abusive — a name like that will be removed. You can delete your whole record at any time with one tap in the game's footer, and it is gone immediately. What is held, and what is refused, is set out in full in the privacy section of every page on this site.
Sponsors and advertising
A local sponsor may be credited on the results screen, and advertising may appear there. Neither ever has any say in the questions, the scoring or the result. Advertising is not permitted inside a round, and never in a way that hides or delays the game.
Liability
The game is provided as it is, for free, for entertainment. To the fullest extent the law allows, no liability is accepted for losses arising from playing it or from it being unavailable — including a missed round, a lost standing or a device problem. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and nothing here takes away a consumer right you have where you live.
These terms, and the law that applies
These terms are governed by the laws of Ontario, Canada, and the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction. If any part of them turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. If they change, the date at the top changes and the change is written plainly rather than tucked into the wording.
Back to the game
What inputresponse records
One identifier, the record of the nights you played, and a declared city if you play for one. No account, no email, no password. Nothing reads your device to work out where you are — and the only thing on the record about place is what you typed into it.
Last updated 14 September 2026. This page describes what the site actually does, written to match the code rather than to sound reassuring.
Every cookie, and everything else stored
Four things, in total. If a fifth ever appears it will be listed here before it is used.
- standing_pid — set by this site. Your random identifier, and the record hanging off it: a declared city if you play for one, a display name if you chose one, your nights played, your best finish, your closest-ever, and your answers. It is signed and HTTP-only, so page scripts can neither read it nor forge one. Lasts about thirteen months from your last visit. Not optional — without it the game cannot remember a round.
- Your answer to the cookie question — kept in your browser's local storage, not in a cookie, and never sent anywhere. It lasts until you change it.
- _ga — set by Google, only if you allow analytics. A random identifier for the browser, so the same visit is not counted twice.
- _ga_… — set by Google, only if you allow analytics. Which pages were visited, roughly where the visit came from, and the state of the current visit.
The two Google cookies are set by Google, not by this site, and are governed by Google's own privacy policy. They last up to two years unless you clear them. Withdrawing the permission is the Cookie settings control in the footer: moving the switch there ends it at once, and clearing cookies in your browser removes them entirely.
There is nothing else. No advertising cookie, no tracking pixel, no social widget, no other third-party script of any kind — with one exception, and it is not one this site adds or can remove from here: Cloudflare, which serves these pages, injects a small script into every one of them that hides the two email addresses on this site from address harvesters. Its only job is to decode an address when a reader clicks one, and it stores nothing. If advertising is ever added it will be a fifth entry in this list, and it will need its own permission — analytics consent will not be stretched to cover it, and nothing advertising-related will run on the strength of the choice you have already made.
The one cookie this site needs
When you first open inputresponse the server puts a random identifier in a cookie called standing_pid. It is signed and HTTP-only, which means the page's own scripts cannot read it and nobody can invent one. It is the only way the game can remember anything, because there is no account to log into.
Held against that identifier: a declared city if you play for one, a display name if you chose one, how many nights you have played, your best finish, the closest you have ever come, and a record of each answer you gave — so the near-miss card can be worked out from real events rather than a counter that might be wrong.
It exists for no other purpose. It is not sold, not shared, not matched against anything else, and not used to advertise to you. It expires after about thirteen months of not being used, and Delete my record in the game's footer removes everything at once, including the identifier.
What is never recorded
Nothing is read from your device. No location permission is ever requested, no coordinate is ever stored, and the nearest cities you are shown are worked out from the city you typed, not from where you are. Nothing is kept about your connection. No IP address is written to the record. Rate limiting uses a value that is hashed in memory and thrown away when the process restarts, so even the flood protection keeps nothing. Nothing finer than what you typed. A declared city if you play for one — that is the whole of it. None of it was read from a device, and none of it is used to work out where you are.
No email, no password, no phone number, no real name. The only name stored is one you type yourself, and it is optional. There is no mailing list to be on and no re-engagement message of any kind.
Analytics, and your choice
Counting visits is optional here, and the choice is genuinely yours. Google Analytics is not loaded at all until you allow it: no request is made to Google, no cookie is set, and nothing is counted. If you decline, that is remembered and you are not asked again — the banner does not return on the next page or the next visit.
If you allow it, Google Analytics records the pages visited, roughly where the visit came from, the kind of device used, which controls are pressed and how far down a page is read, against an identifier Google sets. It never receives what anyone types — not an answer, not a city, not a name, and no form field is read. It is used to see which parts of the game people reach and which they abandon. You can change your mind at any time with Cookie settings in the footer, and the change takes effect immediately.
Google's handling of that data is governed by Google's own privacy policy. If you want to be left out of Google's measurement across every site, not just this one, install the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.
Advertising, when it runs
inputresponse is free to play, with no entry fee and no prize that costs money, and it is paid for by a sponsor and by advertising on the results screen — never in the middle of a round. Advertising is not running at the moment. This section describes what will apply when it does, and it will be true on the day it does.
When advertising runs it will be served by Google. Google and its partners may set cookies or read device identifiers to decide which ad to show, and may show ads based on your interests. You can turn personalised advertising off at Google Ads Settings, and you can see and control what other companies do at aboutads.info and youronlinechoices.com. Advertising cookies are set by Google, not by this site, and they will be subject to the same permission rule as analytics: nothing advertising-related runs before you allow it.
Under California law — the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended — a person has the right to know what is collected, to have it deleted, and to say no to the selling or sharing of personal information. This site does not sell anything about you to anyone. Where personalised advertising begins, that counts as "sharing" under the Act, and the Cookie settings control in the footer is how you refuse it.
Your rights, and how to use them
If you are in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Brazil, Quebec or California, you have rights over what is held about you: to be told what it is, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to object to it being used, and to receive a copy. A complaint can be made to your national data protection authority or, in Canada, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
Here is the useful part: erasure and objection are already one tap, without asking anyone. Delete my record in the game's footer erases everything held against your identifier, permanently and immediately. Turning reminders off, on the front page, stops all notifications and reminders. Cookie settings withdraws permission to be counted. These are not requests that get processed later; they happen when you press them.
Children
This site is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly hold anything about them. There is no account, no email address and no way to contact a child through it. If a record was made by a child, deleting it takes one tap and removes it entirely.
Who is responsible, and changes to this page
inputresponse is run by one person, George Fielder, who decides what happens to the data described here and who is the controller for the purpose of the European rules. There is no company behind it, no staff, and no analytics or marketing agency with access to anything.
Who is in charge of your information
Person in charge of the protection of personal information: George Fielder. He decides why any of it is held and what happens to it, and he is the person to write to about anything on this page — to see what is held, to correct it, to withdraw a permission, or to complain. Contact: privacy@inputresponse.com.
This paragraph is here because Quebec law requires an address, not because the answer is different anywhere else: there is one person running this, so the person who answers is the same one either way.
One thing leaves the country, and only if you allow it. Nothing is transferred anywhere unless you accept analytics — the choice is real and declining means no request at all. If you do accept, the pages you visit are measured by Google, whose servers may be in the United States, and that is a transfer of information outside Quebec and outside Canada. The assessment that rule asks for was made on that basis, and the answer was to keep the transfer optional rather than to make it a condition of playing.
If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the change is written plainly rather than tucked into the wording. Anything that would widen what is collected will be announced on the game page before it takes effect.