Gabblegames Terms of Service

Last updated: 2026-10-04

Operator: [PLACEHOLDER: legal entity name] Registered address: [PLACEHOLDER: address] Contact: [PLACEHOLDER: contact email] Governing law and venue: [PLACEHOLDER: governing law / jurisdiction]

A lawyer has not reviewed this document. See "Before this goes live" at the bottom.

By creating an account or using Gabblegames, you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, don't use the app.

1. Who can use Gabblegames

You must be at least 13 years old (the app asks yes/no age questions at sign-up). If you're under 18, you're treated as a minor account: you play free tables only, and you're kept apart from adult accounts in rooms, matching, calls and messages (see the Privacy Policy, section 7). If you answer that you're under 13, that Google account can't sign up on any device. [PLACEHOLDER: a higher minimum age in countries that require one.]

Right now, Gabblegames is invite-only: you need an invitation (a link from a current player, or opening a game/chat link) to sign up. We can change or lift this at any time.

You sign in with Google. One Google account, one Gabblegames account. You're responsible for keeping your Google account secure; anything done from your account is treated as done by you.

2. The game

Gabblegames is a social app built around casual board and card games (Ludo, Chess, Carrom, Pool, Backgammon, cards, and others). The games are the excuse; rooms are where you hang out with people while you play. We may add, remove or change games, modes, rooms and matching rules at any time.

Robots. When nobody is available to match you quickly, a computer player ("robot") may fill a seat. Robots have names and flags like players'. At a coin table a robot's entry is put up by us (the house): if you beat it you win its entry, and if it wins, your entry stays with us. [PLACEHOLDER: decide whether robots must be marked as robots.]

3. Coins — virtual, not money, not gambling

Coins are a virtual in-app item, not currency and not property. You can get coins by:

• Taking a free coin pack while Gabblegames is being tested ("Free while testing"). Coins cannot be bought with money yet; when they can, a purchase will be subject to your app store's or our payment processor's terms, and we will update these terms first;
• Winning them in games;
• Receiving a one-time welcome grant (1,000 coins, adults only) or other promotional bonus we choose to give.

We may reset or remove test coins, and anything bought with them, at any time.

You can spend coins on:

• Cosmetic items — board, piece, table, cue, puck, card-back and similar "looks" that change how your games look, not how they play;
• Gifts — a look for another adult player in your room;
• Coin-level games — matches where winning or losing moves coins between players (or, when a robot stands in, between you and the house). We keep a 10% fee from each pot.

Coins have no cash value and cannot be cashed out. You cannot redeem, exchange, sell, transfer, or convert coins into real money or any other thing of value outside the app, by any means, under any circumstance. This is not merely a rule we enforce — the app has no feature that withdraws coins as money. Because nothing of real-world value can be extracted, coin-level games are not gambling as we understand it, and we do not intend to offer anything that is.

We may, but are not required to, adjust a balance to fix a technical error.

We may change prices, stakes, fees, bonuses, or remove coins or items entirely, at any time. We don't promise coins or items will always be available or retain any particular value.

4. Rooms, chat, and voice

Rooms let you play with friends or strangers and talk over text or voice while you do. By using chat or voice you agree to:

• Follow our Community Guidelines;
• Not harass, threaten, impersonate, or share illegal content involving anyone, especially a minor;
• Understand that other players in a room or chat can see what you send there, that the app's chat filter hides email addresses, phone numbers and slurs (and, for minors, links, handles and swearing), and that we review what is reported to us, including the copies of messages a report carries.

Room owners can kick, ban, mute and lock their rooms. A room's owner can also broadcast the board and the players' names to a streaming service; your room chat appears in a broadcast only if you agree.

Adult and minor accounts are kept apart in rooms, matching, calls and messages, by our servers. Play nearby, which connects phones that are physically close whatever their age, is for adult accounts only; play nearby with people you know.

5. User content and reporting

Anything you send in chat or voice, or anything else you create or upload ("your content") stays yours, but by sending it through Gabblegames you give us the right to store, transmit, and display it as needed to run the service (e.g. showing your message to the person you sent it to).

You can report a user or a message. We review reports and may warn, mute, suspend, or permanently ban an account, remove content, or refer serious matters (e.g. content involving the exploitation of a minor) to law enforcement, at our discretion and without always being able to tell you what action we took on someone else's account.

Don't upload content you don't have the right to share, or that is illegal, infringing, or exploitative — especially involving a minor, which we treat as a zero-tolerance violation reported to the relevant authorities.

6. What's not allowed

In addition to the Community Guidelines, you agree not to:

• Use bots, scripts, or modified clients to play for you, alter game outcomes, or change coin balances or items (robots we provide inside the app are the only exception);
• Buy, sell, or trade accounts, coins, or items outside the app;
• Exploit bugs for coin or item gain rather than reporting them;
• Reverse-engineer, scrape, or attack the service beyond normal use;
• Use the service if you're banned from it, or to evade a ban.

We may suspend or terminate your account for violating these terms, with or without notice, and without a refund of any coins or paid items.

7. Advertising

Gabblegames may show ads in the future to support free play. If we do, an ad may be served by a third-party ad network under its own terms, and we'll update this policy and our Privacy Policy before that starts.

8. Disclaimers and liability

Gabblegames is provided "as is." We don't guarantee it will always be available, error-free, or that matchmaking, robots, or the live game service will behave perfectly. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we aren't liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from your use of the app, and our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim (or [PLACEHOLDER: a nominal amount] if you paid nothing).

Nothing in these terms limits liability that can't be limited by law (e.g. for fraud, or death or personal injury caused by our negligence, where applicable).

9. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We'll change the "last updated" date, and tell you in-app for material changes. Continuing to use Gabblegames after a change means you accept the new terms.

10. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of [PLACEHOLDER: governing law / jurisdiction], without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Disputes will be resolved in [PLACEHOLDER: venue / dispute-resolution mechanism].

11. Contact

[PLACEHOLDER: contact email]

Before this goes live — a lawyer must check

• What the code enforces today. Coin balances, entries, prices, gifts, the minors' free-only rule and spending cap, and the separation of minors from adults are enforced by our live server. Who won a game is still decided by the players' apps (no server referee), so a modified app could claim wins: section 6's cheating clause carries that until a server checks results.
• Virtual currency / "not gambling" framing (section 3). This is the single biggest legal exposure. Confirm in each market Gabblegames operates that "cosmetics only, no cash-out, house stands in for a missing opponent" actually falls outside that jurisdiction's definition of a game of chance/consideration/prize (the classic three-element test). See India's state-level real-money-gaming statutes and the 2023 IT Rules amendment specifically — several Indian states define "real money game" broadly enough that a coin economy with purchasable coins and win/loss transfer could be captured even without cash-out, depending on wording.
• Refund policy for coin packs, once they are sold, needs to match the app stores' (Google Play, Apple App Store) policies for virtual goods, which sometimes override a developer's own terms.
• House-staked robots and the 10% fee at coin tables need to be checked against the "not gambling" framing.
• Dispute resolution / arbitration clause. Section 10 is a placeholder; decide whether to add mandatory arbitration and a class-action waiver (enforceability varies a lot by country/state — unenforceable in some consumer-protection regimes, e.g. parts of the EU).
• Minors contracting. In many jurisdictions a minor cannot be bound by a contract (or only partially can be) — confirm whether a parent/guardian needs to accept these terms on a 13–17 year old's behalf, and whether that needs to be collected, not just implied.
• Age-gate strength. As in the Privacy Policy, a self-reported yes/no age question is light-touch age assurance; some regulators require more for certain features (e.g. voice chat with strangers).
• GDPR/CCPA cross-references from the Privacy Policy apply to data processing terms embedded here too (e.g. section 4's chat retention).
• Liability cap amount and carve-outs (section 8) are placeholders — needs real figures and jurisdiction-specific carve-outs (e.g. UK/EU consumer law often prohibits excluding liability for the service not matching its description).