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Using Boardgames.io

Terms of use

These terms govern your use of Boardgames.io — a free website for playing classic board games in the browser. By creating an account or a guest account you accept them.

What this service is

Boardgames.io lets you play classic board games — Connect 4, Tic Tac Toe, Mill and Checkers — against other players or against a bot, directly in the browser. Using it costs nothing: there are no paid features, no subscriptions and nothing on sale.

These terms apply between you and the operator of the site, whose name and address are given in the legal notice.

Accounts and guest accounts

You can play with a guest account or with a registered account. A guest account needs neither an email address nor a password; you create it explicitly and accept these terms when you do. It lives in the browser you created it in, so clearing that browser’s storage without registering means losing access to it.

A registered account uses an email address and a password, or a sign-in with Google or Apple. You must be at least 16 years old to create or use any account. Keep your credentials to yourself and do not let anyone else use your account. For what someone else does under your account without your authorisation, you are responsible only where you are at fault for it.

Guest accounts may be deleted once they have been inactive for 90 days; using the site starts that period over. We do not delete registered accounts without cause, and we reserve the right to delete a registered account after a long period of inactivity, which we announce beforehand. When an account is deleted, access and identifying account data are removed; finished matches and competitive records can remain without your name to preserve other players’ records. For details, see the privacy policy.

What others can see

Your username, your results and the course of finished matches can be visible to others: in the match, afterwards in the post-game view and its shareable replay link, and — for registered accounts — on your public player page and in public leaderboards. Guests never appear in public leaderboards, and registered accounts can switch that listing off in the settings without losing play or internal ratings. We do not promise that a replay link stays reachable for any particular time; the privacy policy explains how we process match data and what remains after an account deletion.

How you may use the site

Boardgames.io is meant to be a friendly place to play. When you use it, you agree:

  • not to choose a username that is unlawful, harassing, insulting, threatening, discriminatory, impersonates another person, falsely suggests an official role, or infringes another person’s name or trademark rights, and not to use even the site’s predefined chat messages or reactions to harass others;
  • not to automate play — no bots, scripts or engines that make moves, queue for matches or farm results on your behalf (the bot opponents the site itself offers are of course fine);
  • not to exploit bugs, not to manipulate results, ratings, leaderboards or achievements, and not to agree the outcome of a rated match with your opponent;
  • not to use several accounts abusively — in particular not to influence results, ratings, leaderboards or achievements with them and not to work around a measure we have taken;
  • not to pass on, share, trade or sell your account, and not to play on someone else’s account;
  • not to read out the site’s content automatically or at scale, for example by scraping or bulk queries;
  • not to attack or overload the service, and not to circumvent its technical limits, access controls or the measures that detect or block automated access.

Ratings, season standings, leaderboard positions and achievements are game features, not prizes. They are calculated from stored results and may change when seasons close, errors are corrected or manipulated results are removed. You have no claim to a particular rating, position or achievement. Registered users can opt out of public rankings in Settings without disabling play or internal ratings.

Report suspected unlawful content or prohibited usernames through our public reporting form, with enough information to identify and assess the account or content. You may challenge a moderation decision using the contact details in the legal notice. Found a bug? Reporting it is welcome; exploiting it is not.

Rights to the site and its content

For as long as these terms apply between us, we grant you a simple, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable right to use the site privately and for its intended purpose. This is the right your access rests on, and it ends when your access ends.

We reserve all rights to the service, its software, its design, its content and its match database. This expressly includes the right to prohibit the extraction and the re-use of substantial parts of the match data, whether at once or by repeatedly retrieving insubstantial parts.

Availability

Boardgames.io is a hobby project, offered free of charge and without any promise of availability. The site can be unreachable or slow at any time, for maintenance or for technical reasons, and games or features can change or be discontinued. You therefore have no claim to the service being available, to a particular feature existing, or to a game being kept.

Liability

We are liable without limitation for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, and wherever liability is mandatory by law. Beyond that, our liability is excluded as far as the law allows. Because Boardgames.io is provided free of charge, the milder statutory standards of liability for gratuitous contracts remain unaffected.

The site is not a backup service. Keep nothing here that you cannot afford to lose: match history, ratings and achievements can be lost in a technical failure, and inactive guest accounts may be removed under the rule described above.

Deleting and blocking accounts

You can stop using Boardgames.io at any time. Both registered and guest accounts can be deleted in the settings; what happens to your data then is described in the privacy policy.

We check proposed usernames automatically against a word list, but we do not impose a measure on an existing account solely from that check. Depending on the type, severity, frequency and impact of a breach, we may reject or rename a prohibited username, disregard manipulated results, restrict access to the account or end it.

Where information gives us grounds to suspect a criminal offence involving a threat to the life or safety of a person, we inform the competent authorities without undue delay and pass on the information available to us.

Before we restrict access to an existing account or end it, we tell you the main facts and the rule or legal ground and give you a reasonable opportunity to respond; we then decide again. Where immediate action is needed to avert significant harm to other players or to the service, we may act first and give you that opportunity without undue delay afterwards. Where we remove or change a username, we inform you at the latest immediately afterwards.

Every such notice states the facts and the rule or legal ground, the measure with its scope and, where applicable, its duration, whether we used automated means, and how you can challenge it — through the contact details in the legal notice and, independently of that, before the competent courts.

We may discontinue the service in whole or in part for an objective reason. Where possible, we announce that on the site with reasonable advance notice.

Changes to these terms

Every version of these terms is identified by its date.

When you create an account or a guest account, we record which version of these terms you accepted. We may amend the terms for objective reasons, such as changes in law, security or the functions of the service, while reasonably considering your interests. The updated date identifies the new wording. For an existing account, changes apply only to the extent permitted by law and after any notice or renewed acceptance that the law requires. If you do not agree, you can stop using Boardgames.io and delete your account.

Not every new version asks you to agree again. Each published version is marked as either editorial — corrections, clarifications and changes that do not affect your rights — or material. Only a material version requires a renewed agreement; an editorial one takes effect without interrupting you.

When a material version is published, your account is held until you accept it: instead of the page you opened, we show the new version, the date it was published, a short summary of what changed and links to the current terms of use and privacy policy. Until you agree there you can still read those documents, sign out, or delete your account — and once you agree, we take you back to where you were.