Terms of service

These are the terms you play Inktide under. They are short, they are the whole agreement about playing, and they are served from /terms-of-service by the game server itself so that the version a regulator reads and the version a player reads are the same bytes.

What you can buy and on what terms is a separate document, the Terms of sale, because a refund right and a code of conduct are different things and mixing them makes both harder to read. What is held about you is the Privacy policy. What decides who you play against is Fairness. What we ask of players and what we owe them is Rules.

Inktide is operated by the Stigmera games team. Writing to a person is always an option: [email protected] for anything about conduct, reports or moderation, [email protected] for anything about your data, and [email protected] for everything else.

Playing, and what you agree to

Opening the game creates a guest account and that is the moment these terms start applying. You do not have to give us anything to play — no email, no password, no profile — and you can stop by closing the tab.

You get a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to play the game and to use what you have unlocked or bought, for as long as the game runs. The game itself, its code, its art and its name stay ours.

Who may play, and how age is handled

There is no minimum age to play, and the game is built for a mixed audience that includes children. What follows from that is not a promise in this document, it is how the service behaves:

• You are asked for a birth year, once, at the first action that is regulated — never at first launch. We store an age bracket, not your date of birth. The year you type is used to compute the bracket and is not kept.
• If we do not know your age, you are treated exactly as if you were under 13. Being cautious about an unknown age must never become a way of reading a child's age off the wire.
• For an account in the under-13 band: advertising is contextual and child-directed, nothing is offered for sale, and rewarded video is capped per day.
• For anyone under 18: advertising is contextual only, never personalised.
• Where the law where you are asks for a parent's or guardian's confirmation before a minor's first purchase, it is asked for, and the address used for it is dropped once the link is used or expires.
• Answering the age question dishonestly does not create rights: an account whose band is found to be wrong is corrected, and anything sold to it in error is refunded.

If you are a parent or guardian and something here concerns you, write to [email protected] and a person will answer.

What you can put in front of other players, and what you cannot

The list of what one player can send another is short by design and it is the whole list: a display name, a handle and profile page, canned emotes, map pings, alliance offers, a shared link to a match or a map, and the colour of your territory on the board.

There is no free-text chat, no direct messages, no voice, no audio recording of any kind, no image, video or file upload, and no way to put a link of your own in front of another player. These are not features that have not arrived yet; they are absences the service is built around, and the safety assessments in docs/compliance/ depend on them. If voice ever ships, those assessments and these terms are rewritten before it does, not after.

Nothing in this game listens to your microphone. No audio is captured, transmitted, stored or processed, and the game asks for no microphone permission.

Given all that, what we ask of you is small:

• Choose a name that is not abusive. Names pass a filter before they are created; a name that gets past the filter and should not have can be reported, and it will be dealt with as an account rather than as a string.
• Do not use the game to harass somebody. Following one player between public matches to spoil their game, teaming against one person, or spamming pings at them are all against these terms, and each has its own report reason.
• Do not cheat or run a modified client. The server is authoritative and the replay is the evidence.
• Do not automate accounts, farm rewards, or try to break the service for the people playing on it.
• Do not use the game for anything illegal. Content that is illegal under UK law — and the equivalents where you are — has no place here, and there is deliberately almost no surface for it.

Moderation, reports and complaints

How to report something. Every player screen that shows another player offers Report, from inside a match or from a leaderboard row afterwards; a report does not need a live game and does not need a saved account. You get a reference back. Block is beside it and takes effect immediately, on the server, for as long as you keep it.

What we do with a report. The context — the match, the room, both names and the time — is attached by the server, not by the client, so the person being reported cannot have edited it. A person reads the queue. The outcomes available are: nothing, a name reset, a suspension, or a permanent ban.

If you cannot use the in-game route, or you are not a player at all — a parent, a guardian, a researcher, a regulator — write to [email protected]. It is read by a person and answered.

If you think we got it wrong. Reply to the decision, or write to the same address, and say so. A decision about an account can be appealed by the person it was made about, and an appeal is read by somebody other than an automated check. Complaints about how a complaint was handled go to the same place, and it is the address to use before taking a dispute anywhere else.

Suspension and ending an account

We can suspend or end an account that breaks these terms, and we will say which term. You can end yours whenever you like, from the account screen: deletion removes your account, your career, your name and your events. What survives a deletion, and why, is set out in the Privacy policy and the Terms of sale — in short, a pseudonymised accounting record of anything you paid for, which nothing in identifies you.

The map, and who made the data under it

Inktide's maps are generated from open geographic data, and the licences on that data require the source to be named where the data is shown. So it is named in the game as well as here, on the map sources screen, and the credit travels with the map rather than being compiled in:

• OpenStreetMap contributors, for coastlines, rivers and water bodies — © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).
• The Copernicus DEM, produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018, provided under the Copernicus Data Licence.

There are no country names and no borders on any map in this game, anywhere, by rule. Places are geography; players are told apart by the colour and the name of their house.

What we do not promise

The game is provided as it is. It runs on servers that are sometimes restarted, matches are sometimes lost to a network, and a season ends. We do not promise the service will be uninterrupted, that any particular feature will exist for ever, or that a match will be error-free. What we do not exclude is anything the law does not let us exclude, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, and fraud — and nothing in these terms takes away rights you have as a consumer where you live.

Which law, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the law of the operator's country, and nothing in that choice removes the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in — including, in the United Kingdom, your rights under consumer protection law and your ability to complain to Ofcom about how this service handles online safety. Talk to us first, at the addresses above; it is faster and it usually works.

When these change

Changes are written into the changelog with a date, in plain language, rather than appearing silently in a longer document. A change that makes a real difference to you — a new way for players to reach each other, a change to how age is handled — is announced in the game before it takes effect.

Last updated: 2026-09-09.