Terms of use

Your account

You can play without signing up. When you first arrive we create a guest account and keep it in your browser's local storage. It is yours, but it lives on that device: clearing your browser data, or switching to another device, starts a new one, and we cannot recover the old one because we have no way to prove it was yours. Signing in attaches the account to you properly, and is the only way to keep a rating across devices.

One account per person. Extra accounts used to inflate a rating or farm coins may be removed along with everything they earned.

Coins are not money

Coins are a way of keeping score and nothing else. They are earned by playing. They cannot be bought, cannot be exchanged for money, goods, or anything outside this site, and cannot be transferred between players. There is no cash-out, and there never will be one — the design of the site depends on it.

Because nothing of value can be staked, won, or withdrawn, playing here is not gambling and you are never risking anything. We may correct coin balances that are wrong, whether through a bug on our side or abuse on someone else's.

Who you play against

Nine Mills is new, and at quiet hours there may be nobody waiting for a game. When no human opponent is available, you may be matched with a computer opponent instead. Computer opponents use ordinary handles and are not marked as such during a game. They follow the same rules and the same rating system as everyone else, and they are rated at a strength close to yours, so the game is a real contest rather than a formality.

The proportion falls as more people play — the point of it is that a new player is never left staring at an empty queue. If you would rather know for certain, playing the computer and two players on one device are exactly what they say they are.

Fair play

Do not use an engine, a solver, or another person to choose your moves in an online game. Do not deliberately lose to move coins or rating to another account, and do not abandon games to avoid a loss — leaving a game in progress is scored as a resignation.

We look at move timing to find engine use. Where we find it we may reset a rating, remove coins, or close the account.

Your handle

Handles are public. Do not use one that impersonates somebody, or that you would not want read out. We may change a handle that breaks this, and will not invent a polite way of telling you why.

While the site is in beta

Nine Mills is early. Features will change, the site will sometimes be down, and ratings, coins and game history may be reset while we are still getting the numbers right. If we do reset anything, we will say so on the site rather than hoping nobody notices.

Our liability

The site is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available, and we are not liable for a lost rating, lost coins, or lost games. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

Changes to these terms

If we change anything that matters we will update this page and move the date at the top. Continuing to play afterwards means accepting the change.

Getting in touch

Questions about any of this go to hello@ninemills.com. How we handle your data is a separate page: privacy.