Leaving the board, for good.

• Sign in, open Settings, and use “Delete your account” at the bottom. It works the same on the web and in the Castle Gambit app.
• It needs a sign-in from the last 15 minutes. If yours is older, it asks you to sign in again first, then brings you back.
• Your profile, sign-in, memberships and the rest go, and you’re signed out everywhere. Your games stay with the people you played, under “Former player” instead of your name.
• We hold your handle for 14 days, so nobody can pick it up and pass as you, then let it go.
• There’s no grace period. Once it’s done, it can’t be undone.
• Can’t sign in? Write to support@castlegambit.com and we’ll delete it for you.

1. Sign in at castlegambit.com and open Settings. Signed out, the link asks you to sign in first.
2. Scroll to the bottom: “Delete your account” has a sheet of its own, under “Your data”.
3. Tap “Delete my account”. It shows you exactly what goes and what stays (the same lists as below).
4. Type your handle to confirm (or the word “delete”, if you never picked a handle), then tap “Delete my account”.
5. You’re signed out, and you land on a page that says your account is deleted.

If it asks you to confirm it’s you: deleting needs a sign-in from the last 15 minutes, so someone who finds your phone or laptop still signed in can’t do it for you. Tap “Sign in again”, sign in, and you’re back at the same section: tap the button again.

If you own a Castle or an organization with other people in it, the button waits until you hand it over: make someone else its owner first (Settings links you to the page where you do it). One with nobody else in it (a request to join or an invite doesn’t count) doesn’t stop you: it stays, without an owner, on our list of Castles and organizations needing one, and we hand it on only to someone who asks to take it on.

The app shows the same Castle Gambit pages, so it’s the same section and the same steps:

1. Open the Me tab. It opens your Settings.
2. Scroll to the bottom, to “Delete your account”.
3. Tap “Delete my account”, read what goes and what stays, type your handle and confirm.

The app asks for the same fresh sign-in: if you signed in more than 15 minutes ago, it has you sign in again first, then brings you back to the section.

Before you go, you can download your data: Settings, “Your data”, “Download my data”, a few times a day. It’s one file (JSON) with your account’s data: your profile, games and rating history, Castles, gambits, puzzles and the rest. We make the file when you tap, send it straight to your device and don’t keep a copy. In the app, you choose where to save it.

It leaves out other people’s details (your opponents appear under the names your game history shows), and the file lists what’s left out, and why. After you delete your account there’s nothing left to download, so do it first.

When the delete goes through, you’re signed out everywhere, and all of this goes with it. It’s the same list Settings shows you before you confirm.

• Your sign-in: your email address, any Google link, and every device you’re signed in on.
• Your profile page, handle and photo. We hold the handle for 14 days, so nobody can pick it up and pass as you, then let it go: all we keep meanwhile is the handle and the date. Handles you changed away from stay held for the rest of their 14 days, for nobody.
• Your Castle memberships and requests to join (with our notes of the member links you joined by, and of any organizer removing you), your helper roles, and your organization roles and invites.
• Linked chess.com and Lichess accounts, and our copies of them.
• Your replies to gambits, so your spots free up.
• Gambits you host. Any that haven’t started are called off first, and everyone going gets the usual email. A Castle’s own (a club night’s, say), upcoming or past, passes to another of its owners or organizers instead, replies and all, if it has one.
• Your Club card (crowns, promoted pieces, stamps and its count of your club nights) and your puzzles (XP, records and badges).
• Your opening trainer book, if you saved it to your account, and the count of times you cleared one.
• A reviewer’s grant on the opening trainer.
• Your blocks: the people you blocked, and anyone’s block of you.
• The Castles you follow.
• Your follows of people, anyone’s follow of you, and the people you removed. Nobody is told.
• Your weekly digest setting, and what we keep of its stop links.
• Any ambassador application you sent, and your ambassador section with its referral code and its daily counts of taps on “Book a session”, and the latest answer about your Twitch channel.
• Whether you counted your sign-up for an ambassador. That ambassador’s number drops by one.
• What this browser keeps for Castle Gambit: an opening trainer book kept here or this browser’s copy of a saved one, puzzles saved here, and settings like the theme. Other browsers and devices keep theirs until you clear them there.

If you pay for something: Club Plus you pay for is cancelled at the end of the period you’ve paid for, and nothing more is charged. Dues you pay a club stop renewing at the end of the period you’ve paid for, with no refund from us (the club can refund you, from its Stripe account), and what the club’s Stripe account holds (your name, email and receipts) is the club’s: ask them.

A few things stay, because they’re part of other people’s games and club nights as much as yours, or because we have to be able to answer for what our staff did. Again, the same list Settings shows you:

• Your games, for the people you played: under “Former player” instead of your name, with your rating’s details behind them (the numbers, and where it started) shown to nobody, so everyone else’s history still adds up.
• Your check-ins at club nights, which count in each Castle’s night numbers, under “Former player” too. If you never played a game, your player and its check-ins go too.
• Castles and organizations you started stay with their owners, without your name on them. Roster players you added stay on their roster, without the note that you vouched for them.
• Reports anyone made about you stay with our team, marked that you deleted your account and when, and nothing more about you. Any you made stay too.
• If you had the verified check, our staff log of it stays for two years: when it was given or came off, who did it, and the note of how we checked.
• If you applied to be an ambassador, our staff log of what we decided stays for two years: who approved, declined, paused or ended it, and why. Never your bio, links or note.
• If you reviewed the opening trainer’s lines: your reviews, notes included, stay as our record that a line was checked, signed by your title alone; our staff log of your grant stays for two years.
• A Castle’s activity log keeps its rows for 12 months. What you did there shows as “Someone no longer here”; a row about you (a role you were given, say) keeps the name it was written with.
• Copies of emails we sent you, for the week we keep them, and the early-access list if you joined it: ask us to take you off that one.

And a few things Settings’ list doesn’t cover:

• Our staff log. Deleting your own account in Settings isn’t written on it. If our staff delete it for you, or did anything else to your account (a suspension, say), the log keeps what was done, when, which of our staff did it, the name or handle it was done to and the reason, for two years. A ban also keeps a one-way scramble of the account’s email address, never the address itself, until the ban is lifted.
• The people who help us run it keep their own records, on their own terms: Resend, which delivers our emails, keeps its own logs; Vercel, our host, keeps its own logs of requests; and Stripe keeps its records of anything you paid. Anything you wrote to us stays in our inbox until we delete it.

Every detail, and how long each kind of thing is kept, is on our privacy page.

If you joined a club night as a guest (a first name and last initial, no email; nobody new could after 26 October 2026), you have a guest account. It deletes itself 30 days after it was made, by a daily sweep, however often you play: the clock starts when you join, not at your last visit. It ends sooner if anyone signs in on that phone without saving your games. Your opponents keep their games against you, under the name you played as.

A guest account has no “Delete your account” button, because there’s no email address to confirm it’s you. To have it deleted sooner, or for a copy of what it holds, write to us at support@castlegambit.com with the name you played as, and the Castle and the night. Or save your games (add an email in Settings): it becomes an account like any other, and you can delete it in Settings the usual way.

Write to support@castlegambit.com and ask us to delete your account. It helps to write from the email address on the account, and to tell us your handle if you remember it. A person reads every message.

Before we delete anything, we make sure it’s your account. We reply from support@castlegambit.com, and we act only on a request that comes from the account’s own address, or one confirmed from it: if you wrote from another address, we write to the account’s address and wait to hear back, or ask you to sign in and use Settings yourself. We never ask for a sign-in code, and Castle Gambit has no passwords to ask for.

When we delete it for you, the same things go and stay as above, and our staff log notes that we did. The one difference: we can’t clear what your browser keeps for Castle Gambit (the theme, puzzles saved there), so clear that in your browser if you like.

Castle Gambit is for adults: nobody under 18 has an account. If you think someone under 18 has one, the page for parents says how to ask us to delete it.