Where Your Retro Bowl Save Actually Lives
· 6 min read
The browser version keeps your progress in one string on one browser profile. Here is what that string is, what wipes it, and how to copy a season to another browser.
It is a string in your browser, not an account
The browser build keeps its data in local storage, under keys that all begin with RetroBowl. On a first launch there is exactly one of them, RetroBowl.0.optiondata.dat, and it holds your settings rather than a team. More keys appear under the same prefix as you play.
None of it is readable text. That first entry opens with a 32-character checksum and continues as base64; decode it and you get JSON that starts with a version number and your options — weather on or off, scanline filter, sound, which way a drive runs. The whole thing is about 400 bytes.
The shape matters for one practical reason. A save here is a string, and anything that can copy a string can move your progress.
What actually erases it
Local storage belongs to one origin in one browser profile. Not one device — one profile. Chrome and Firefox on the same laptop hold two unrelated saves, and so do a normal window and a guest profile on the same browser.
The usual causes of a lost season are mundane: "clear browsing data" with site data ticked, a private or incognito window (which throws everything away on close), and the browser setting that clears site data on exit. A managed school device may do that last one at every logout without announcing it.
Playing the same game on a different unblocked mirror also starts you at season one. Each domain is a separate origin and origins cannot read each other's storage. That is a browser security rule, not a decision any site made.
Copying a save to another browser
Because the save is a string, moving it is copy and paste. Open developer tools on the page where the game runs (F12, or Cmd-Option-I on a Mac), go to the console, and read the entry out with copy(localStorage.getItem('RetroBowl.0.optiondata.dat')). That puts the whole value on your clipboard.
On the other browser, open the console on the same site and write it back with localStorage.setItem('RetroBowl.0.optiondata.dat', 'paste the value here'), then reload. If more RetroBowl. keys exist by then, repeat for each one — the storage panel in developer tools lists them all.
One habit worth keeping: never paste console code you were handed by a stranger. The two lines above only read and write this game's own entry, and you can see exactly that by reading them.
The app and the browser hold two different careers
The mobile app stores progress in the app's own storage rather than in a browser, and the browser build has no account system to tie the two together. A dynasty built here will not appear in the app, and an app dynasty will not appear here.
For moving between phones, New Star Games have said that backing up and restoring the phone's data carries the save file with it. That is a device-level backup question rather than anything the game exposes on its own.
Habits that make a lost season unlikely
Pick one browser profile for the game and stay in it. Most lost saves are not dramatic; they are somebody finishing a season in a guest window, or on the other browser that happened to be open.
Take a copy after anything you would hate to replay — a championship run, a draft class that landed well, the season a late-round quarterback finally developed. It takes about ten seconds and the file is small enough to keep in a note.
If the device is not yours, assume its storage will be wiped and plan around it. A copy in a note on your phone survives a school laptop being reimaged; nothing stored on that laptop does.
How this was checked
The key name, byte size, and structure above were read directly from the build this site serves, rather than repeated from another guide. The round trip was tested too: removing the entry and pasting the same string back returns the value byte for byte.
The phone-transfer note comes from the official Retro Bowl account. Everything else is ordinary browser behaviour that you can confirm in your own developer tools in about a minute.
For what "unblocked" means for the network rather than the save, there is a separate piece on this site about why a page can load while the game does not.