Terms of Service

The agreement

These terms are an agreement between you and Vinyl Owl Studios LLC, a Florida company (“Vinyl Owl Studios”, “we”, “us”). They cover vinylowl.com, your Vinyl Owl account, and our games and their servers — Four Color War, Canasta Club, LastEve and Pug — including test builds. By making an account or using any of them, you agree to these terms and to ourPrivacy Policy. If you don’t agree, please don’t use them.

Your account

• You must be 13 or older to make an account. If you’re under 18, have a parent or guardian read these terms with you.
• Give us a real email address you can receive mail at, and keep your password and sign-in to yourself. You’re responsible for what happens on your account; tell us at privacy@vinylowl.com if you think someone else is using it.
• One person per account. Don’t sell, share or transfer accounts.
• Player names can’t be offensive, impersonate someone, or mislead. We may change a name that breaks this.

Playtesting and early builds

Our games are in development. If you’re a playtester or play a preview build:

• Expect bugs, crashes, missing features, and changes. Builds can stop working when we update the servers.
• We may reset progress, ratings, stats, items or other game data at any time during testing.
• Tester access is by invitation and we can change or end it at any time.
• Test builds are for you only: please don’t share the files or download links. Talking about the games and sharing screenshots or video is welcome unless we ask you not to for a particular build.
• Feedback helps a lot. Sending it is optional, and how we use it is covered under What you post.

Using our games

We give you a personal, non-commercial, non-transferable license to use vinylowl.com and our games for as long as these terms allow. The games, their art, music, code, names and logos belong to us (or the people we license them from); the license doesn’t give you ownership of any of it. Please don’t copy, sell, modify, or reverse-engineer our games or servers, except where the law lets you regardless of these terms.

Play fair, be decent

Don’t:

• cheat, use bots or automation to play, or use hacks, exploits or modified clients that give you an unfair advantage;
• harass, threaten, bully or stalk anyone, or post hateful, sexual or violent content;
• impersonate others, including us;
• try to get into accounts, servers or builds you don’t have access to, or interfere with our servers (including overloading them or making bot accounts);
• use our games or chat to spam, advertise, or scam;
• break the law, or help anyone else do any of the above.

If you find a bug or exploit, please tell us instead of using it.

What you post

Your player name, chat messages and feedback are yours. So that we can run the games, you give us permission to store, show and pass them along to other players as the games need (for example, showing your chat to your table). Feedback and ideas you send us we may use freely to improve our games, without owing you anything for them. Don’t post anything you don’t have the right to share.

Voice chat. When you talk in a game’s voice chat, your voice is sent live to the players it’s meant for. It isn’t recorded, except when someone is reported: then the game saves the last 30 seconds of the reported player’s voice that reached the person reporting, that person’s own voice, and the chat they could see, and sends it to our moderators (the Privacy Policy has the details). By using voice chat you agree to this, including to being recorded in that way when you or another player makes a report. If you don’t want that, turn voice chat off in the game’s settings; the rest of the game works without it.

Progress and in-game items

In-game currency, items, unlocks, ratings and progress have no real-world money value, aren’t your property, and can’t be sold or traded for money. We may change, rebalance or remove them. We don’t sell anything today; if we ever do, the store we sell through and any extra terms we publish then will apply to those purchases.

Moderation and ending accounts

If someone breaks these terms, we may warn, mute, suspend or ban them (including turning off just their voice chat), remove content, or delete their account, depending on what happened. These terms apply to voice chat as much as to text. You can mute, always mute or block other players yourself at any time. We try to be fair and proportionate, and you can write to us if you think we got it wrong. You can stop using our games and delete your account at any time — see thePrivacy Policy.

Changes to the games

We’re a small studio making games we love, and they’ll change as we go. We may add, change or remove features, take servers down for maintenance, or stop running a game. We’ll give notice of big changes when we can, but we can’t promise any game or server will always be available.

Other companies’ services

Installing through an app store or test program (like TestFlight or Google Play), or playing through a platform like Steam means that company’s terms apply to that part too. We’re not responsible for their services.

Disclaimers and liability

Our site and games are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. To the fullest extent the law allows, Vinyl Owl Studios won’t be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, progress or profits, arising from your use of our site or games; and our total liability for any claim about them is limited to fifty U.S. dollars ($50). Some places don’t allow these limits, so they may not all apply to you.

If you break these terms or the law and someone makes a claim against us because of it, you agree to cover our reasonable costs from that claim.

Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If something goes wrong, please email us first — most problems can be sorted out that way. Otherwise, any dispute will be handled in the state or federal courts located in Florida, and you and we agree to those courts’ jurisdiction; either of us may also bring a claim in small-claims court where it qualifies. If you live somewhere whose laws give you rights these terms can’t take away, you keep them.

If any part of these terms can’t be enforced, the rest still applies. If we don’t enforce something right away, we haven’t given it up.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms and will change the date at the top when we do. For significant changes we’ll tell you on the site or by email before they take effect. If you keep using our site or games after that, the new terms apply.

Contact

Vinyl Owl Studios LLC · Florida, USA · privacy@vinylowl.com