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Layatown (formerly Jevtown) is an experiment. It is not affiliated with TypeSafe, Convai Innovations or X.

The game: Beat the AI

This section covers the game at play.jevtown.com: Beat the AI's duels, and the village, fields and Darkwood they are fought in. The rest of this page covers the city, which closed on 22 September 2026.

What the game keeps

On the game server (Fly.io, US east): one save per hero, stored under a random hero key (24 random characters that nobody can guess). A save holds the game and nothing about you: the hero's name (picked by the game from a fixed list; you never type one), their job, skills, bag, coins, gear and title, what the villagers think of them, the village itself, the party, the game's own chat lines and the clock. There are no accounts and nothing you type is stored, because there is nothing to type. The one exception is below: your X handle, only if you connect X to show it on the leaderboards.

In your browser (localStorage, not cookies): layatown.v3.heroKey, the key of the hero you are playing, sent with every request so the server knows which save is yours; layatown.v3.previousHeroes, the key, name and job of up to three heroes this browser played before (so the menu can take you back to one); and v3.muted, your sound setting. The key travels only in a request header, never in a web address. Anyone holding your key can play your hero, so do not share it.

Your network address is held in memory for a few minutes to limit abuse (how many requests and new heroes come from one place) and is never written down. The game loads no third-party scripts and no analytics.

What the server logs

Your X handle on the leaderboards: only if you connect X

The leaderboards show each hero's game-given name. From your hero sheet you can choose Connect X to show your X @handle next to your hero's name on the boards. It is off unless you connect. Connecting sends you to X, where you sign in; X then sends you back with your account's id and @username. That is all the game takes: it never posts, follows or reads your posts or messages, and it keeps no access to your account (the sign-in's access token is dropped at once).

What is kept: your X account's numeric id and your @username, in your hero's save, and your @username on your hero's leaderboard entries, which everyone can see. Your hero key never goes to X. Disconnect X on the hero sheet takes both off at once; Delete my hero does too. If you change your username on X, connect again to update it. The server counts how many sign-ins were started, finished or failed, with no handle and no key.

The village switch: off unless you turn it on

The menu has one switch, off by default, with these exact words: “Let my trips help train future villager minds. Anonymous: no name, no handle, no address. You can turn it off any time.” Your choice is saved with your hero.

The villagers' minds are rules written in the game's code, and with those minds nothing about your game is logged, whether the switch is on or off. If the villagers are ever run by a trained model instead (a fine-tune of Laya, the open model by Convai Innovations), a hero whose switch is on would have their game logged: the villagers' and companions' decisions, your moves and the story of each trip, kept under a run id, not your key. That model would run on the project's own computer and receive the village's state, never your key or your address. Turning the switch off stops the logging at once and marks what was logged as withdrawn, which keeps it out of any dataset. Nothing from this game has been used for training so far.

Beat the AI duels: a second switch, off unless you say yes

Duels have their own switch, separate from the one above (which never covers duels), and it is off unless you turn it on. After a duel with a rival, the result screen asks once, with “Not now” as large as “Yes”; the Rival trail has the same switch for later. Its exact words: “Share my duel rounds to help train the game's move-guessing model. For each round we keep my move, the game's guess, how long I took to tap (to the quarter second) and the round's state, under a random id with no name, key or address, and only the day. The game keeps which id is mine only so Delete my hero can find it. Some shared duels show the guess only after I move, for a fair comparison. After the study ends, my rounds are published as a dataset under a new random id, with no key, name, address or time of day, though the game's records could still link a duel to me; withdrawn rounds never are. Off unless I say yes. Turning it off stops it; deleting my hero deletes what is stored. Neither reaches the dataset once it is made, and models already trained keep what they learned. If you are under 16, please leave this off.”

What is kept, when it is on: for each round of a duel, your move, the guess the game showed you and its reason, both sides' hearts and power, the opponent's odds and its move, and how long you took to tap, rounded to a quarter of a second (anything over 30 seconds is kept as “30 seconds or more”). For each duel: which opponent, your level, gear and cards, which version of the game's guesser you faced, the day's bounty, what that opponent had counted about your earlier shared duels, roughly how many duels you had played before, shared or not (in bands: 0, 1, 2-4, 5-9, 10-19, 20+), and the day (never the time of day). Each duel also keeps its own id and its secret, which is revealed when it ends so anyone can check the opponent's moves were drawn before yours. It is kept on the game server under a random id made when you said yes, not under your hero key, and never with your hero's name or your network address. The game keeps which id is yours only so Delete my hero can find and delete it; nothing else uses that link. Saying yes again after turning it off makes a new id. Only duels that start after your yes are kept.

What changes in the game: apart from your tutorial duels (the tutorial Slime and your initial duel with Pip) and the daily boss, about one shared duel in five shows the game's guess only after you move instead of before. The study needs these to compare fairly; everything else about the duel, its rewards included, is the same.

What it is for: the minds study, which asks whether a small model, retrained each night on the rounds people chose to share, predicts moves better than the same model frozen. Its plan and rules were fixed and dated on 26 September 2026, before anyone's rounds were recorded, and are published here: the minds study plan. The training runs on the game server; during the study the rounds are not sent anywhere else.

The dataset: after the study ends, the shared rounds are published as a dataset in which each player's random id is replaced by a new one (not the one the game kept), with no hero key, name, network address or time of day. Rounds of anyone who turned the switch off, or deleted their hero, before it is built are never in it; it is built when the raw records are deleted (below). A published dataset cannot be recalled.

Pseudonymous, not anonymous: the dataset holds no id the game keeps for you, but each duel keeps its own id, its secret and its sealed moves, so that anyone can check it. The game server's secret together with your hero's save, or the duel details your own browser was shown, could still match a duel in it to you, and so every round you shared under the same yes. We will not attempt that matching, and once a hero is deleted its save is gone.

Turning it off stops the recording at once and marks what was recorded as withdrawn: it is left out of every training from then on and never goes into the dataset. A model already trained on it keeps what it learned (there is no way to un-train one), which is why the switch says so. Delete my hero deletes your duel data with the save. Once the dataset is built, neither can reach it: it is no longer stored under any id the game keeps for you, so there is nothing to find it by.

Age: the game has no age check. If you are under 16, please leave this off.

Whatever the switch says: each rival and boss remembers counts of how you played against it (its card, for example “What Mira has counted”, shows them); that memory is part of your hero's save, like the rest of the game, and is deleted with it. The daily Humans vs AI tally adds each hero's result into totals, with no key or name.

How long we keep it

A save is kept until you delete it or the game is reset. There is no automatic clean-up yet; if we add one (for example, for saves nobody has opened in months), the rule will be written here before it starts. Shared duel rounds are kept for the minds study only: at the latest at the end of its day 60, counted from study day 1 (the first full game day, 13:00 to 13:00 UTC, with recording on; rounds from the part-day before it are kept to the same date), the recording stops by itself and the raw records are deleted, with every working copy made from them. What stays is the dataset made from them (a new random id per player, no withdrawn rounds), under its data card.

Deleting your hero

Open the menu and press Delete my hero, then confirm. The server deletes that hero's save at once, and with it any logs of their game kept under consent, including shared duel rounds (until the study's dataset is made; see above). It cannot be undone. New hero does not delete anything: the old hero stays saved and can be continued from Previous heroes. To remove what your browser keeps, clear this site's data in your browser's settings.

The city, until it closed: if you only watched and played

The city closed on 22 September 2026, and the Lab's You vs Laya never opened. This part and the two after it say what the city kept while it ran; its record, the board at closing included, is kept as it was.

We keep nothing that identifies you. Your browser holds a random id and the game gives you a made-up name; your score and the citizen you follow are kept against that random id, so a restart does not lose them. Your network address is held in memory to limit abuse and is never written down. There are no accounts, no cookies, and nothing that follows you around. The website jevtown.com (not the city) counts page views with Vercel Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and keeps no identifiers: it tells us totals such as how many people came from X and how many were on a phone. The city shows how many people have visited: that is a single number. Your browser tells the server "this is my first visit" once, the server adds one, and nothing about you is kept with it. Until 25 September 2026 the website kept a similar count of its own visits: once a day, any page sent the city server an empty request and the server added one, and the only thing stored was that day's date, in your own browser. The site no longer sends it.

Since 21 September 2026 nobody types anything in the city: chat is a set of preset reactions and events are picked from a menu, so no model reads anything a player writes. Until then (the Jev era), chat messages and proposed sentences were screened by an AI model and logged as text without anyone's identity; those logs are kept for the study and never published with names.

If you claim a citizen with X

We keep exactly this, in one file on the game server: your X user id, your X handle, which citizen is yours, your browser's random id, and when you claimed. Your handle is shown on that citizen's card, in captions about them, on the owners' scoreboard and, while you have the page open, in the list of owners who are here now. Handles come from X sign-in and are not screened by a model; the project can hide any handle from public view. We do not receive your email or your password, we do not keep any access to your X account once sign-in finishes, and we never post, follow or read anything on your behalf.

Your handle is never given to the AI model that decides what citizens do.

Deleting it

Open your citizen's card and press Release. That deletes the record at once and frees the citizen. You can also remove the app's access in your X settings, under connected apps.