Terms

Conway's Kingdom is a game, offered free, with no account and no purchase. These terms cover playing it at play.conwayskingdom.com and using this website. Playing means accepting them.

What it is

An unbounded shared world running Conway's Game of Life, in which players own the cells they place, mine them back for value, and wall each other off with ice. A server holds several worlds, called rooms, and each is a separate game.

The source is public, under the licence stated in the repository. These terms are about the service running at play.conwayskingdom.com, not about the code — what you may do with the code is the licence's business, not this page's.

There is no money in it

Worth saying plainly, because the game talks about value, purses and mining: none of it is money. There is nothing to buy, nothing to sell, no currency, no token and no cash-out. A purse is a number in a simulation. Nothing you accumulate has value outside the world it was accumulated in, and nothing here is an investment of any kind.

What you can expect

The honest answer is: a game that is being built, running on a machine that is not a data centre.

Worlds are saved periodically, and a crash or a restart can cost up to about thirty seconds of play. A match in progress is not saved at all and does not survive a restart. Rooms can be reset, renamed or removed. There is no uptime commitment, no support commitment, and no promise that a world you built will still be there tomorrow.

If that matters to you, the game runs entirely offline against a server of your own — the repository documents how — and a save file is a file you can copy.

What is expected of you

Don't attack the service: no attempts to overload it, break out of it, or reach parts of it that were not offered to you. Don't use the game to harass anybody — display names, room names and anything else you can type are covered by that.

Automated play is allowed. The server has an HTTP API for exactly that, and bots are a supported kind of player. What is not allowed is using automation to degrade the game for other people — flooding a room, occupying seats to deny them to others, or hammering the API past what it is willing to serve.

A server may refuse or remove anybody, for these reasons or without giving one. There is no appeal, because there is no account to appeal about.

What you make

Patterns you save and worlds you build are yours in every sense that matters: they are stored for you, shown to nobody else unless you put them in a shared world, and the server does not read them. Putting cells into a shared room makes them part of that room, and other players can act on them — that is the game.

No warranty, and limits

The game and this website are provided as they are, with no warranty of any kind. Nothing here is guaranteed to be available, correct, or fit for anything in particular. To the extent the law allows, no liability is accepted for anything arising out of using either — including a world you lose.

Changes

These terms carry the date they were last changed, at the top. Continuing to play after a change is how a change is accepted, because there is no address to send a notice to.