Terms of Service

TobyChess provides a free, browser-based chess platform: a real-time 1v1 multiplayer mode played over private, shareable room links, and a daily tactics puzzle ("Daily Puzzle") that challenges players to find a forced checkmate sequence. No account, registration, or payment is required to use any part of the Service.

You agree to use TobyChess only for its intended purpose — playing chess. In particular, you agree not to:

• Use any engine, bot, automation script, or third-party assistance to generate moves in a live multiplayer game against another human opponent.
• Attempt to disrupt, flood, or overload the Service, including its WebSocket infrastructure or the daily puzzle statistics endpoint, through automated or scripted requests.
• Attempt to reverse engineer, scrape, or bulk-extract the daily puzzle dataset for republication or resale (see Section 3, below).
• Use the private room-link system to distribute unlawful, abusive, or harassing content via room names or shared links.
• Interfere with another player's use of the Service, including deliberately abandoning games to manipulate outcomes or disconnect timers.

Because TobyChess does not use accounts, we cannot suspend a "user" in the traditional sense; we reserve the right, however, to block access at the network level for traffic that violates these Terms.

The TobyChess name, logo, site design, and software (including the puzzle-selection and move validation logic) are the property of TobyChess and its creators and may not be copied, redistributed, or used to create a derivative service without prior written permission.

The daily puzzle positions are curated and organized into a structured dataset (forced mate-in-3 through mate-in-5 sequences, together with their reference solution lines) as part of the Service. While individual chess positions and the rules of chess itself are not subject to copyright, the specific curated selection, sequencing, numbering, and presentation of the TobyChess daily puzzle dataset is our proprietary compilation. Bulk downloading, scraping, or republishing this compiled dataset (for example, to power a competing puzzle product) is not permitted without our prior written consent.

TobyChess is free to use and is supported by advertising served through Google AdSense. By using the Service, you acknowledge that ads may be displayed alongside gameplay. See our Privacy Policy for details on how advertising cookies are used.

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of connectivity issues — in particular, real-time multiplayer games depend on your and your opponent's network connection, and a dropped connection may end a game.

We make reasonable efforts to keep the daily puzzle solutions and move validation logic accurate, but we do not guarantee that every puzzle is free of error.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, TobyChess and its creators shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or any loss of data, arising out of or related to your use of, or inability to use, the Service.

We may revise these Terms from time to time. Continued use of the Service after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms. The "Last updated" date above reflects the most recent revision.

Questions about these Terms can be sent to [email protected].