Terms of Service — Driftile

Effective date: 2026-09-03
Last updated: 2026-09-27
Version: 1
Published at: https://driftile.com/terms/
Applies to: the Android application com.bakerly.driftile distributed on Google Play, and the iOS application of the same name distributed on the App Store.

These terms are an agreement between you and Omar Diar Bakerly (trading as Bakerly Apps) ("we", "us"), Herwarthstraße 63, 47137 Duisburg, Germany.

They sit beside two other documents, and the three do different jobs:

A note on how this was written

This document was not drafted by a lawyer. It was written from the game's own source code by reading what the app and the server actually do, in the same way the privacy policy was. Everything in it is meant to describe a real mechanism — where a clause says we may do something, there is code that does it, and where there is no code, the clause says so rather than claiming the power anyway.

What that means for you, stated plainly:

• It is deliberately narrow. Where the choice was between a broad term we could not honestly stand behind and a narrow one we can, it is narrow. There is no clause here transferring ownership of what you make, no clause disclaiming everything imaginable, and no arbitration clause.
• It cannot override the law, and does not try to. We are established in the European Union, so mandatory consumer law applies to this agreement whatever it says. Unfair terms in a consumer contract are void, statutory warranty rights cannot be signed away, and liability for death, personal injury or gross negligence cannot be excluded. Several sections below say which parts of them give way to local law, and they mean it: if any sentence in this document gives you less than the law where you live gives you, the law wins and that sentence does not apply to you.
• It has not been reviewed by a professional. If you are relying on it for something that matters, that is worth knowing.

Feature status

Parts of this document describe features that are not switched on in the version you have. Each row says which. A row marked NOT ACTIVE or DOES NOT EXIST describes nothing that is happening today.

1. The short version

The game is free to play and most of it does not involve us at all. The campaign, the builder, Curiosities and the solver run on your device. You do not need an account, you do not need to tell us anything, and nothing in this document asks you to.

What you build stays yours. Publishing a level to Community gives us permission to show it to other players, and nothing more than that. You can take it down at any time. We do not own it, we will not sell it, and we will not put it in something else.

There are rules for what other players can see, and they are in the Community Guidelines rather than here. The short version is that a board is a picture and a picture can say things.

We can hide or remove a published level, reset a nickname, and withdraw access to Community — and take you off that board. Those are the only things we can do to you, they are listed in section 7.6, and none of them locks you out of the game.

When you buy something, you buy it from Google or Apple and not from us. Refunds run through them, and section 10 explains the 14-day withdrawal right and the one thing that can end it early. An earlier version of this line said nothing was on sale; billing went live on 5 September 2026.

You must be 13 or older. That is not a judgement about the game, which is rated for everybody. Section 3 explains the difference.

2. What this agreement is, and when it starts

By downloading, opening or playing Driftile, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use it — and if you have it already, uninstalling ends the agreement for the future.

We are the provider of the game. The store you installed it from — Google Play or the Apple App Store — is not a party to this agreement. It has its own terms with you, and where they conflict with ours on anything about the store (payment, refunds, your store account, redistribution of the app) the store's terms govern and ours give way. That is section 10.1 in detail.

Every copy of the game now comes from one of those two stores. There was a browser version served by us directly, with no store involved; section 12.3 is what became of it.

3. Eligibility and age

3.1 The minimum age is 13

You must be at least 13 years old to use Driftile. If you are under 13, you may not use it, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under that age.

This is not the game's content rating, and the two numbers are different things. People read the higher number as a judgement about the game, and it is not one:

So the age floor is driven by the ad SDK and by user-published content, not by anything about the puzzles. It is the lowest age that keeps both. It has nothing to do with the friends features, which came months later.

3.2 We do not check your age

There is no age gate in the app and nothing asks you your date of birth — we looked, and there is no such screen and no such field. So this section is a term you are agreeing to, not a check we perform. If you are under 13 and using the game, we will not have detected it; if we are told, we will delete what we hold. Write to [email protected].

If you are a parent or guardian and a child under 13 has been using the game, contact us and we will delete the data held against that player, as the privacy policy describes.

3.3 Kids mode

The game contains a simplified mode meant for a young child: a board, a count, a help button, and one way out. Inside it there are no ads, no shop, no in-app purchases, no sign-in, no community levels, no leaderboard and no friends.

Kids mode does not lower the minimum age and does not make this a service directed at children. It is a switch in Settings that an adult turns on before handing over the phone, and the account it runs under belongs to that adult rather than to the child. It is a handover lasting minutes — the way out is a press-and-hold rather than an arithmetic question, deliberately, because a parental gate is a device belonging to a programme this app is not in.

The agreement in these terms is with the adult who installed the game. A child using kids mode is not entering into it.

4. Your licence to play

We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and play Driftile on devices you control, for your own private enjoyment.

The game itself — the code, the engine, the puzzle boards we generated, the artwork, the level design, the name and the look of it — is ours and stays ours. Nothing in this licence transfers any of it to you.

What you may not do with the game:

• sell it, rent it, sub-licence it, or distribute copies of it;
• remove or alter anything identifying us as its author;
• interfere with the game or our servers on purpose — automated requests at a volume the game does not produce, deliberate attempts to get past a rate limit, or attacks on the service;
• use the game to break the law, or to help somebody else break it.

And what this licence does not restrict, because it cannot: your statutory rights to decompile or analyse the software where the law allows it — interoperability under Art. 6 of the EU Software Directive, and the equivalent in your own country — are unaffected by anything above. Nor is a right you have under mandatory local law to make a private backup copy.

The game is free to download and free to play. There is no purchase price for the app itself, on any platform. Section 9 is about items inside it and section 10 is about paying for them.

5. Your account

Driftile has an unusual arrangement here and it is worth two paragraphs rather than one line, because "account" means two different things in this game.

5.1 The account we create for you

The first time the game can reach the internet, our server creates a player account for you. There is no sign-up screen, no email address, no password and nothing to fill in. It is an identifier the server generates, and it exists so that anything involving other people is possible at all — a friend list, a challenge, a published level with an author behind it.

You never see it, you cannot be asked for it, and it identifies nothing about you outside the game. What is held against it is a short list of figures — your nickname, your friend code, levels solved, stars, streaks, awards — and the privacy policy is where that list lives in full.

It lives on that device. It cannot be recovered on its own: lose the phone and that account is gone with it, along with anything held only against it. That is not a defect we intend to fix by other means — signing in is what makes progress recoverable, and it is the only thing signing in is for.

5.2 Signing in

Signing in is entirely optional and the whole game works without it. If you choose to, you give us an email address and we mail you a six-digit code — not a link, and not a password — or you sign in with Google, in which case Google tells us the email address on the account you picked and nothing else.

There is no separate sign-up step. The first time you enter a code for an address we have not seen, the account is created; there is nothing to fill in and no profile to complete.

What that buys you is cloud save: your progress, your built levels, your purchases and your settings kept on our server so they follow you to another device.

There is no password. Access to your account is a code sent to your email address, so the security of your account is the security of your mailbox. We cannot reset a password because there is none, and we cannot recover an account from an email address you no longer control. Keep the mailbox secure and keep access to it.

5.3 Your responsibility for what happens on your account

You are responsible for what is done through your account, including by anyone you hand your unlocked device to. If you think somebody else has reached it, sign out on that device and write to us at [email protected].

Two people, one phone. If somebody signs in on a device where a different player was signed in, the game clears the previous player's data from that device rather than merging the two games together. Their game is safe on their own account; the copy on that phone is not. That is deliberate — a merge would silently mix two people's progress — and it is worth knowing before you hand your phone to a friend who wants to try signing in.

5.4 One person, one identity

Do not create accounts in order to get around something: a rate limit, a withdrawal of Community access under section 7.6, a block another player has put on you, or the once-only limits on things like a starter pack. We do not currently detect this and we are not claiming that we do; it is a term, and evading an enforcement action is itself a breach of it.

5.5 Deleting your account

Settings → Delete account, in the app, and it works whether or not you ever signed in. It removes the account and the data held against it — the privacy policy and https://driftile.com/delete-account/ are the authoritative lists of exactly what goes and what stays — and it takes down any levels you published. It happens immediately, you do not have to ask us, and it cannot be undone.

The copy of the game on the device goes with it, and the app restarts with a new, empty account. Until 5 September 2026 the device was deliberately left alone; that made the button do nothing observable for anyone who had never signed in, since for them the copy on the device is the account. Purchases survive, because the store holds them and not us — Settings → Restore purchases. https://driftile.com/delete-account/ is the full list of what outlasts deletion.

If you have already uninstalled, there is a route that does not need the app: https://driftile.com/delete-account/. The privacy policy and the deletion page are where the detail of what goes and what stays lives.

6. Acceptable use

Beyond the rules about published content in section 7, these are the things you agree not to do:

• Do not attack the service. No attempts to break, overload, or gain unauthorised access to our servers, our database or another player's account.
• Do not automate the game. No bots, scripts or modified clients playing on your behalf, and no tools that submit results the game did not produce.
• Do not falsify a result. Section 8.5 is honest about how much of this we can actually see.
• Do not abuse the reporting tools. Reporting levels you simply dislike, or organising other people to report one, is a breach in its own right.
• Do not impersonate us. We will never contact you inside the game asking for a password, a code, or a payment.
• Do not misuse the feedback form. It is a one-way box with no reply channel; it is not the place for anything you need an answer to, and not the place for anyone's personal information.

Playing badly is not a breach of anything. Neither is building a puzzle that is unfair, ugly or impossible — that is what ratings and the Broken or unsolvable report reason are for.

7. What you make, and what other players see

This is the longest section because it is the part of the game where you and other people meet, and because everything in it is a real mechanism rather than a reserved right.

The rules themselves are in the Community Guidelines, not here, so that they can be updated as the game changes without reopening a contract. By publishing a level, choosing a nickname, or playing with other people, you agree to them as well as to these terms.

7.1 What other people can see

Three things you create are visible to people you have never met:

Nicknames are not names, and that is deliberate. The game never asks you for your name, nowhere accepts one, and signing in with Google does not use the name on your Google account — because that name would be published beside everything you do, and nobody agreed to that by pressing Continue with Google. Until you choose a nickname you have a generated one of the form Guest and six digits, picked on your own device.

The third one is the one people forget. A grid of tiles and walls is a picture, and a picture can say things. It counts as content you published, exactly as text does.

There is nothing else. There is no chat, no comments, no messaging, no profile bio, no images you can upload and no free text anywhere in the social features. The only thing one player can send another is one of six fixed emoji in a round's lobby or on its standings — 👍 😂 🔥 😮 😭 👋 — chosen from a list the server enforces, one per player, replaced rather than accumulated. It is a wave, not a conversation, and that is on purpose.

A share code — the short string that describes a board — contains the puzzle and nothing about you: not your name, not your device, not when you made it. Handing one to somebody is your decision and we never see it.

7.2 What you keep, and what you give us

You keep everything. The levels you build are yours. Nothing here transfers ownership of them, and we do not claim any.

What you give us, only for a level you actually publish, is permission to do the things publishing requires: to store it, to show it to other players, to draw its board as a thumbnail in a list, to hand it to another player's device so they can play it, and to show your nickname beside it. In legal terms that is a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence, limited to operating and promoting Driftile, and it lasts for as long as the level is published plus the short time it takes to remove it from the places it has been copied to.

What that licence deliberately does not include:

• We will not sell your level, or license it to anybody else.
• We will not use it outside the game — not in advertising for other products, not in a different app.
• We will not edit it. We can hide it or remove it; we have no mechanism to change what you built, and we are not reserving the right to acquire one.
• It does not survive taking the level down. Withdraw it and the licence ends with it.

Drafts are not published. A level becomes visible to other players only when you tap Publish. If you are signed in, drafts are copied to your account as part of cloud save — that is a private backup, and it grants us none of the above.

Your nickname is a separate, narrower thing: by setting one you allow us to display it beside what you publish, to the players you have added, and — once the journey leaderboard ships — on that board, unless you switch your name off there. That is all it is for.

7.3 What you are promising us about what you publish

When you publish a level or set a nickname, you are telling us that:

• it is yours to publish, or you have permission — it is not somebody else's artwork, trademark, or a level copied out of another game;
• it does not break the Community Guidelines;
• it contains nobody's personal information, yours included.

If somebody else's rights are infringed by something published in Driftile, write to [email protected] with enough detail to find it — the level, the nickname, or a link — and what the claim is. We will look at it.

7.4 We do not review levels before they appear

Levels are published immediately. Nobody at our end looks at one first. Moderation is what happens afterwards — when something is reported, or when one of the automatic checks fires.

Two automatic checks do run at the moment you publish, and both are ours rather than a human's:

• The name is checked against a word filter and a level whose name fails it is refused there and then rather than reported later. The same filter runs on a nickname. It is a denylist of about 1,300 terms across ten languages, matched against a normalised form of what you typed so that spelling around it with dots, digits or lookalike letters does not help. It is a speed bump and not a wall, and it makes mistakes in both directions.
• The board is checked against a set of shape stencils — a small pattern of walls, matched exactly, in all eight rotations and reflections. A match does not refuse the publish. It stores the level hidden and records why, and a person decides afterwards.

Why a match hides rather than refuses, since this is the part that looks inconsistent: refusing teaches evasion. "Rejected" tells whoever drew it to move one cell and try again until it lands. And the specific shapes at issue have legitimate religious use, which is exactly why the outcome has to be a review by a person rather than an automatic verdict. For the same reason, the app is not told which check fired — it is told only that the level is being looked at.

The move count you claim for a level is also verified: the server re-solves the board and a level whose stated optimum is wrong does not get published as though it were right.

7.5 What we may do about content

Three reports hide a level automatically, before anybody at our end has looked at it. Only reports from distinct accounts count, so one person cannot do it alone. That is deliberate: for the kind of content the guidelines prohibit, waiting for a human is the wrong default.

After that a person reviews it, and the outcome is one of:

We may also act without a report, if we find something ourselves.

You can also report a player rather than a level — for their name, for harassment, or for cheating. A report about a person carries no free-text field on purpose, and it does not act on anybody by itself: a person reads it and decides.

Every one of those actions is written to an audit log on our side, by the same function that performs it, together with what the level's state was before. That is not a courtesy to you — it is how a decision can be reviewed later — but it is the reason an appeal has something to look at.

Nothing we do deletes your level. Hiding it and removing it both leave the level itself intact, so both are reversible, and restoring it brings back its ratings and its play count with it. **The destructive one is your own *Take down*** — see section 7.8.

7.6 What we may do about a player

This is a short list on purpose, and it is the complete list of what the software can actually do to somebody:

A nickname reset gives you nothing in place of the name. We do not invent one for you — a name we chose for somebody is a different and worse thing to do to them — so you are simply back to the generated Guest default until you pick another.

Withdrawal of Community access is time-limited, always: it is a date, not a permanent state, and it defaults to 30 days. Nothing in the game extends it automatically.

We cannot and do not lock you out of the game. There is no ban, no suspension and no account disablement in the software, and this document does not reserve one. Everything single-player — the campaign, the builder, Quick Play, the daily — keeps working throughout. If your access to Community is withdrawn you are a player who cannot publish, not a player who cannot play.

A nickname reset is what happens when the name is the problem. It exists so that the answer to a bad name is not the removal of somebody's levels, which punishes the wrong thing.

7.7 Appeals

If you think we got a decision wrong, write to [email protected] and say what was hidden, removed or reset. A person will look at it again. Every action we take is recorded with a reason, so there is something to look at.

That is the whole appeal path, and it is worth being honest about its limits. There is no appeal button in the app, no case number, and no automated process. Nor does the game currently tell you when a level of yours has been hidden — so in practice you may find out because a level of yours stopped appearing to other people. If that happens, email us; it is not a trick.

7.8 Taking your own content down, and blocking

Take a level down at any time. Its ⋯ menu has Take down, and deleting it from your device takes it down too. Deleting your account takes down everything you published.

Taking a level down is the one irreversible thing in this section, and the app warns you: it deletes the published copy outright, so its ratings and its play count are lost and republishing the same board starts it at zero. That is deliberate — a level "taken down" that kept its title and your nickname on our server would not have been taken down.

Block a player. The flag on any of their levels offers Block this player. Everything they have published disappears from Community for you, and so does anything they publish afterwards. It lasts until you undo it under Settings → Blocked players, and it is invisible to them — they are not told and nothing they see changes.

Blocking and reporting are different tools and neither replaces the other: a block changes what you see, a report is how we find out. Use both if both apply.

Blocking applies in Community. Friends, challenges and rounds are separate surfaces and are not covered by it yet.

8. Playing with other people

8.1 Friends

You have a friend code: eight characters, generated once, yours for as long as the account exists. It is meant to be shared, and holding it lets somebody ask to be your friend — nothing else.

Somebody enters your code and sends a request; you accept or decline. Nothing is shared with them until you accept. Declining is permanent — that person cannot ask again — and you can remove a friend at any time.

There is no search and no directory. Your code is matched exactly or not at all. Nobody can find you by typing your name, and the only list of players is the journey leaderboard (section 8.4), where a stranger's row opens nothing but a way to report or block them. A code that matches nobody and a code that is malformed give the same answer, so the feature cannot be used to work out which codes exist.

A friend code is minted once and cannot be changed — it is yours for the life of the account, because a code that rotated would be a code nobody could put in their profile. Holding somebody's code authorises nothing but asking. The friends list is capped at 200 people.

You can also block a player — from their page, or from their row on the journey leaderboard. Blocking ends the friendship, drops any pending request in either direction, means they cannot ask again, and takes them off your leaderboard. Settings → Blocked players lists everybody you have blocked and undoes each. It is silent — they are told nothing, and a request they send afterwards gets exactly the answer a wrong code gets. Unblocking is permission to ask again, not a restored friendship. This is a different thing from blocking a publisher in Community, section 7.8; the two are separate acts and neither implies the other.

8.2 Rounds and challenges

You can play a set of boards against friends in a round, entered with a six-character code, or send a challenge that the other person plays when they like. A round's code is something one person reads out, so the people in a round are not necessarily people you have added — and the name and picture you have chosen to show are visible to them.

8.3 Rate limits, and what one looks like

Every action that writes something is metered, per player and per network address. This is not a penalty and it does not mean you have done anything wrong: it is what keeps one script from filling a table.

If you hit one, it clears within the hour. Anything a player can reach by playing is metered hourly rather than daily, deliberately — a day-long window turns "slow down" into "come back tomorrow", and once cost a household testing the game an entire evening's results. A handful of meters keep a daily window because per-day is the rule they express: how many levels you may rate in a day, how many reports you may file, and how often a single view counts toward a level's play count.

8.4 Leaderboards and ranking

The journey leaderboard ranks players by how many journey levels they have solved, with a This week tab and a Friends tab. What it shows and to whom is section 3.14 of the privacy policy: your nickname, picture and level counts, to every player. Settings → Privacy → Show my name on the leaderboard shows you there as "Player" instead, and a visibility of just you keeps you off it. It is built from progress your app reports, which is not replayed on our server (section 8.5), so it is policed differently from a round: a count above the journey's length, or one that grew faster than play allows, is not ranked, and we may take a player off the board where the numbers say they were not earned by playing. That removes the row from the Journey and This week boards and nothing else — not your game, your progress or your purchases — and you can ask us about it at [email protected].

There is no daily board. It was removed on 19 August 2026; score submission still happens so that one could return, and nothing displays it.

Ranked play does not exist. The privacy policy describes what it would be, so that building it is an edit to a table rather than a rewrite — but nothing in this game today produces a rating, and this document makes no promises about one.

A rating, if one is ever added, would ask you separately before putting your name on a public list. The journey leaderboard does not ask: it shows a nickname — a random one until you choose your own, and the nickname field tells you it is public — and counts of levels, and one switch takes your name off it.

8.5 Fair play, and what we can and cannot detect

You agree not to submit a result you did not play. What we can actually see about that is uneven, and it is more useful to you to know which is which:

So the honest position is this. Where two people compete over the same board, the solution is replayed on the server. Everything else is trusted, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The journey leaderboard (section 8.4) is the one place strangers are ranked on a trusted number, and it is the reason this paragraph used to say there was no global board: a number strangers rank on is worth cheating for, and an unpacked app is not a place where a client's word can be trusted. So that board does not rely on the number being honest. It never ranks a count above the journey's length or one that has grown faster, on average since the player first appeared, than a day's play allows, and a player can be taken off it.

Even the replay has a limit worth stating, because it is stated in the code: it catches a score that was not played, and it cannot catch somebody solving with a solver open beside them. Nothing distinguishes that from skill.

What we may do about a result we do not believe: refuse to count it — which the replay does automatically — and, if it involves published content or another player, the actions in section 7.6. We have no mechanism to void a score after the fact or reset a rating, and we are not claiming one. The single exception is the journey leaderboard, from the version that carries it: a player can be taken off that board (section 8.4), which removes their row and nothing else. On the daily in particular there would be nothing to act on: the link between a result and a player is overwritten with random data after seven days by design, so an old row belongs to nobody.

9. Virtual items

The game has three kinds of thing you can hold: hints and Jokers, which are spent; cosmetics — profile pictures, frames, and board looks — which are worn; and entitlements such as ad removal, which are simply on or off.

None of them is money and none of them is property.

• They have no cash value and cannot be exchanged for money, refunded as money, or redeemed for anything outside the game.
• They cannot be transferred, gifted, traded or sold to another player. There is no mechanism for it anywhere in the game, and there is not going to be one by accident: every "gift" in Driftile is from us to you.
• There is no currency. Hints and Jokers are counted, not banked as a balance you could convert.
• They exist inside your game. What you hold is a permission to use a feature, not a thing you own.

Where they come from. Hints and Jokers are earned by playing — three free hints a day, quest and award payouts, the weekly chest, a chapter gift, a Joker after repeated restarts on one level, and rewarded video you choose to watch — and they can also be bought in packs. Cosmetics are the other way around, and the rule underneath them matters: a picture says who you are and a frame says what you have done. Every profile picture is free or comes with the Complete Edition, and none is earned; frames are earned by playing, with five reserved to the Complete Edition. Board materials are always free and never gated. No cosmetic is sold on its own — the only way to buy one is the bundle, and the standalone frame products that once existed were withdrawn before ever going on sale.

Three prizes from the daily gift wheel are loans rather than objects, and they expire: a premium picture or frame for 24 hours, the pair of them for a week, or an hour without interstitials. When one expires you go back to what you were wearing before it, never to nothing, and it never applies on another device because it is not recorded on our server at all.

We may change the balance of the game. Payouts, prices, quest targets, how many hints something gives, what a chest holds — these are tuning, they live in a configuration table rather than in the app, and they change. That is not a breach of this agreement and it does not entitle you to a refund of items you already earned. What we will not do is take away something you bought in order to sell it back to you.

Hints, Jokers and cosmetics you own do not expire, and there is no inactivity forfeiture. Two things are allowances rather than holdings and do not accumulate: the three free daily hints, and the wheel loans described above.

If you delete your account, they go with it. Hints, Jokers and earned cosmetics are held against your account and against your save; deleting the account removes them, and that is not reversible. A purchase is different — it is held by Google or Apple against your store account, so it survives, and Restore purchases brings it back. Section 10.8.

10. Purchases

Status: ACTIVE, as of 5 September 2026. The billing code ships and is running against real billing: the simulated mode it used while there was nothing to sell — every purchase completing for free — was removed that day, and a purchase is now verified against the store's own servers before anything is unlocked.

Whether a given product is on sale at a given moment is a fact about Google Play and the App Store rather than about the app. If a price is shown to you, it is real and you will be charged it — by the store, never by us; see 10.1.

Corrected on 6 September 2026. This note said the app was in a simulated mode and that no payment of any kind could be taken. Both stopped being true on the 5th, and everything below this line was written for the simulated world and has been re-read against the live one.

10.1 Who you are buying from

You buy from the store, not from us. On Android the seller and merchant of record is Google (Google Play Billing); on iOS it is Apple (the App Store). We never see and never receive your card number, your bank details, your billing address or your full name.

That has three consequences worth stating:

• The store's terms apply to the transaction and take precedence over anything in this section where the two differ.
• Refunds run through the store, not through us. Section 10.6.
• The pre-contractual information the law requires a seller to give you — the price including tax, the payment terms, the withdrawal notice — is shown to you by the store at the point of purchase.

10.2 What is sold, and what each grants

Seven products are planned. None of them exists in either store today.

The difference between the two types matters:

• One-time (non-consumable) products are permanent. The store remembers you own them, and Restore purchases brings them back on a new device.
• Consumable products are spent. Once the hints are in your game they are yours to use, but there is nothing left in the store to restore — so a consumable does not come back with a restore, and it is tied to the game it was delivered into. If you delete your account, spent and unspent hints from a pack go with it and cannot be reissued.

There are no subscriptions. Nothing in Driftile recurs, and nothing charges you again after the first time.

10.3 What a purchase gives you

A purchase gives you a licence to use the item inside Driftile, on the terms in section 9. It is not a sale of goods and not a transfer of property.

Ad removal is the one worth being precise about. Buying it ends the interstitials — the occasional full-screen ads between levels — permanently. Rewarded video remains available, because it is something you choose to watch in exchange for a hint and removing it would take away a way of earning them. If you would rather never see an ad at all, do not tap the offers; nothing else in the game changes.

10.4 Delivery

Delivery is immediate: the store confirms the purchase, the app reads that confirmation and unlocks what you paid for before anything is sent to us — somebody who has just paid must not have to wait on a network request. The entitlement is also written to your device so the game works offline, and to your account so it survives losing the phone.

We check purchases with the store afterwards. A claim that a purchase happened is confirmed against Google's or Apple's own records, and one that cannot be confirmed is refused. That check runs behind the scenes and does not delay anything you paid for.

If a purchase completes and the item does not appear, the first thing to try is Restore purchases, which re-asks the store what your account owns. If that does not fix it, write to [email protected] with the store's receipt and we will sort it out. A payment that the store took and the game did not honour is our problem, not yours.

10.5 Your right of withdrawal, if you are a consumer in the EU

This is the part that most game terms get wrong, so it is spelled out.

As a consumer in the EU you normally have 14 days to withdraw from a purchase of digital content, without giving a reason and without penalty. For digital content delivered immediately, that right ends early only if both of these are true: you gave your express prior consent to delivery starting before the 14 days are up, and you acknowledged that doing so loses you the right of withdrawal.

In practice, the store handles this at the moment of purchase. Google Play and the App Store present the consent and the acknowledgement themselves, as part of the checkout you complete — so for a purchase where you confirmed immediate delivery, the 14-day right will normally have ended when the item was delivered.

What we will not do is pretend that is the same as you never having had the right. So:

• Where the right of withdrawal still applies to your purchase, you may exercise it, and a claim of "all sales are final" does not defeat it.
• Where you believe the consent and acknowledgement were not properly obtained, say so — to the store, and to us at [email protected].
• None of this affects your statutory rights if what you bought is faulty. A withdrawal right and a right to a working product are different things, and section 14 is the second one.

10.6 Refunds

Refunds are the store's to give, because the store took the payment:

• Google Play — your purchase history and refund requests are in your Google Play account, under Google Play's own refund policy.
• App Store — the same, through Apple's Report a Problem route.

We cannot reverse a charge we never received. What we can do is help: if something did not work, tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it and, where a refund is warranted, support your request to the store rather than leave you arguing it alone.

What happens to the item when a refund goes through, since this is the part most terms leave vague:

• A refunded one-time product is taken back. Our server asks the store, on a schedule, which purchases have been refunded or cancelled, and removes the entitlement each one granted. If you are refunded for ad removal, the ads come back. That is not a penalty — it is the other half of the refund.
• Hints and Jokers already granted are not clawed back. A hint you have spent cannot be un-spent, and we do not run your balance backwards. A refund of a consumable is something we sort out by talking to you rather than something the software undoes.

10.7 Prices, and products being withdrawn

Prices are set per country by the store and can change. A change never affects something you have already bought.

We may stop selling a product, change what a future purchase of it includes, or replace it with a different one. What we will not do is change what a product you have already paid for gives you. One product has already been withdrawn before ever going on sale, and its identifier will not be reused for anything else.

10.8 Restoring a purchase

Restore purchases re-asks the store what your store account owns and unlocks it again. It works for the one-time products; it cannot restore a consumable, because there is nothing left in the store to restore. It creates no record with us.

11. Advertising

The game shows advertising through Google AdMob, in two forms and nowhere else:

• Rewarded video — you tap a button offering something in exchange for watching a video: a hint, a Joker, a chapter gift, a spin of the daily gift wheel. Declining costs you nothing but the reward. Each of those has its own daily limit — three hint videos a day, one Joker, three spins of the wheel — so rewarded video is optional but it is not unlimited.
• Interstitials — occasional full-screen ads between levels, and one at the end of a finished round with friends. Never during a puzzle, never on the daily puzzle, never after a level you failed, and never in the first fifteen levels of the journey. They are capped per session and per day.

Buying ad removal or the Complete Edition ends the interstitials permanently. Rewarded video stays, and that is a decision rather than an oversight: it is optional, it is how hints are earned for free, and taking it from the people who paid would punish them for paying. The store copy says so — "No more interruptions between levels. Videos you choose to watch stay." Kids mode has no ads at all, for everybody, whether or not anything was bought, and the ad SDK is not even started while it is on.

If a rewarded video does not pay out. The reward is credited when the ad network reports the video as watched, and two situations are worth naming because they are real:

• A video closed early pays nothing. The network sometimes serves two ads in one slot and only reports the reward after the last of them, so closing the first one ends the offer with nothing earned. That is the network's behaviour, not a deduction by us, and nothing is charged against your daily limit either.
• A lost connection at the wrong moment can cost you the reward. On the daily gift wheel specifically, the spin is decided on our server after the video, so a request that fails at that point can mean a video watched and nothing paid, and the game does not retry. If it happens, tell us at [email protected].

Nothing on the wheel is a gamble. You are not buying a spin, you are not paying for a chance at something, and there is no currency between you and the odds — it is a free gift whose contents vary.

We do not control what an ad says. Ads are chosen by Google and the networks bidding through it, not by us, and an advertiser's own terms and privacy policy apply to what happens if you tap one. We do cap the content rating we will accept from the network — and it is worth being plain that a cap is not a guarantee. There is no certification behind it and there will be a remainder. If you see an ad that is inappropriate in a game rated for all ages, tell us: we can raise it with AdMob and tighten what we ask for.

Personalisation, and consent. In Europe no ad is personalised without your consent; the app asks through Google's own consent form, and if you decline you still get ads and they still pay out the hint — they are simply chosen without profiling you. What data AdMob receives, and how to reset or delete your device's advertising ID, is in the privacy policy rather than here.

12. Availability, and changes to the game

12.1 We do not promise the game is always available

Most of Driftile runs on your device and keeps working with no connection at all — the campaign, the builder, Quick Play, the solver. The parts that need our server — the daily puzzle, Community, friends, rounds, cloud save — need our server, and it can be down, slow, or being changed.

We will not promise uptime we cannot deliver, and the game is built so that a server outage costs you a feature rather than the game.

12.2 The game will change

We add levels, chapters, modes and features, and we remove and rebalance things. Content you have already unlocked, and progress you have already made, is not something we take away as a matter of course — but a feature can be retired, and a mode can be changed. Where a change is material we will say so in the app.

12.3 The browser version, which is retired

The game used to run in a browser at driftile.com/play, and these terms applied to it identically. It does not any more. That page now serves no game at all — it links to the App Store and to Google Play and nothing else — so from 7 September 2026 the only copies of Driftile are the two applications named in the header.

Two things follow, and both are in your favour rather than ours. There is no longer any version of the game that these terms reach except through a store, so the store's own terms sit alongside ours everywhere (section 10.1). And nothing you did in a browser was taken away by the change: progress you made while signed in belongs to your account and the app picks it up when you sign in there. Progress made without signing in stayed in that browser, as section 3.7 of the privacy policy has always said it did.

12.4 iOS

There is a second native version of the game for iOS. It is the same game — there is no iOS-specific game code — and these terms apply to it identically. Several platform features are not wired on iOS yet, notifications and in-app purchase among them, and where a section above describes something that needs one it does not apply on a version that does not have it.

13. Ending this agreement

13.1 By you

At any time, and in three ways depending on how much you want gone:

• Stop playing, or uninstall. That ends the agreement for the future and removes what is on the device.
• Sign out, if you want the account left intact and this device disconnected from it.
• Settings → Delete account, if you want the account and the data held against it gone. It works whether or not you ever signed in, it happens immediately, and it takes down anything you published. It cannot be undone. What exactly it reaches — and the few things it deliberately leaves, your own device's copy of the game among them — is listed at https://driftile.com/delete-account/.

13.2 By us

We may withdraw your access to Community, and reset a nickname, for a breach of these terms or of the Community Guidelines — as section 7.6 describes, proportionately, and for a stated period rather than for ever.

We cannot end your access to the game itself, and we do not reserve the right to. There is no ban and no account suspension in the software.

We may stop offering the game altogether, or stop offering it in a country. If we do, we will give what notice we reasonably can, and it does not entitle us to keep money for something never delivered.

13.3 What survives

If the agreement ends: the licences you gave us for content you had published end when the content comes down; anything you owe or we owe under section 14 survives; and sections 9 and 14 continue to apply to whatever happened while it was in force.

14. What we promise, and what we do not

14.1 Your statutory rights come first

We provide the game with reasonable care, and it is meant to work. If it does not — if it is faulty, or does not do what it is described as doing — you have statutory rights, and nothing in this document limits them. In the EU those are the rights the Digital Content Directive gives you, implemented in the law of your own country: to have it brought into conformity, and where that fails to a reduction or a refund.

Nothing in this section applies where it would be void. In particular we do not, and could not, exclude or limit:

• liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• liability for intent or gross negligence;
• liability under the product liability rules;
• your statutory conformity and warranty rights as a consumer;
• anything else that cannot be excluded under the law where you live.

14.2 What we do not promise

Subject to all of the above:

• We do not promise the game is uninterrupted or error-free. Software has bugs; a puzzle game's bugs are usually a wrong number rather than a disaster, and we fix them.
• We do not promise a particular result. Not a rating, not a rank, not a level being solvable in the number of moves somebody claimed for it.
• We do not promise that content another player published is accurate, decent or any good. Section 7.4 is honest about the fact that nobody reviews it first, and section 14.4 is what that means.
• We do not promise your data cannot be lost. Cloud save exists precisely because devices are lost, and it is a copy rather than a guarantee. If you have never signed in, your game lives on one device and nowhere else — which is worth knowing before you lose it, not afterwards.

14.3 Liability

For anything not covered by section 14.1, our liability is limited as follows, and only as far as the law allows:

• For slight negligence, we are liable only where we have breached an obligation that goes to the heart of this agreement, and then only for the damage that was typically foreseeable for a free puzzle game.
• We are not liable for lost progress, lost items or lost time beyond that, nor for anything you could reasonably have avoided — the obvious example being the one in section 14.2: a game that exists only on a device you then lost.
• Where we are liable for money, the practical ceiling is what you have actually paid us for the game in the twelve months before the claim. For most players that number is zero, because the game is free — which is exactly why this clause cannot be the whole story, and why section 14.1 comes first rather than last.

If a court finds any part of this section unenforceable, that part does not apply and the rest does. We would rather write a limit that holds than one that sounds impressive and is void.

14.4 Other people, and other companies

• Content other players publish is theirs, not ours. We host it and we moderate it reactively; we do not endorse it and we did not check it first.
• Advertising is Google's and the advertiser's. Section 11.
• Purchases are the store's. Section 10.1.
• Where you take a share code, a result or a friend code is your decision, and the app you hand it to has its own terms from that point.

15. Data and privacy

These terms deliberately do not describe what data the game handles. That is the privacy policy, it is much longer than this document, and it is the authority — if anything here appears to contradict it about data, the privacy policy wins.

Three things belong here rather than there, because they are terms and not disclosures:

• You agree that we may process your data as the privacy policy describes, where our lawful basis for doing so is performing this agreement.
• Deleting your data is a right, not a favour, and the route is Settings → Delete account or https://driftile.com/delete-account/. You do not have to ask us and we do not have to agree.
• Where the privacy policy says something needs your consent — personalised advertising, notifications — that consent is separate from accepting these terms and refusing it does not end your right to play. You cannot consent to those things by agreeing to this document, and this document does not ask you to.
• The same goes for the things it does not ask consent for. Help improve the levels is a switch in Settings that starts on and sends anonymous gameplay statistics, and privacy policy section 5 explains why it needs no consent and why you can turn it off anyway. Agreeing to these terms is not what switched it on, and turning it off changes nothing about your right to play.

16. Changes to these terms

We will update this page when the game changes, and update the Last updated date and the version number at the top.

• For a clarifying change — rewording, a corrected address, describing something more precisely — the updated page is the notice. It is dated and it is always at https://driftile.com/terms/.
• For a material change — a new obligation on you, a new power for us, a change to purchases or liability — we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. For a change that needs your agreement rather than your awareness we will ask you to accept the new version; the card that does that is built and is not currently shown, because nothing since these terms were written has needed it. If you do not accept, you may stop playing, and where you have paid for something you cannot use as a result, say so and we will deal with it fairly.
• We will not apply a change retroactively to something that already happened.

Previous versions are available on request.

17. Governing law, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the law of Germany.

If you are a consumer, that does not cost you anything. Under EU law the mandatory consumer protections of the country you live in apply to you regardless of the sentence above — a choice of law cannot take them away, and we are not trying to. So: German law governs, and whatever your own country gives you that is more protective still applies.

Where a dispute goes. The courts of Germany have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, you can only be sued in the country where you live, and you may bring a claim either there or here — that is EU law and it overrides anything narrower.

There is no arbitration clause in this document, and no class-action waiver. We are not asking you to give up a court.

The European Commission runs an online dispute resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are not obliged to, and are not willing to, take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board (Verbraucherschlichtungsstelle).

18. The rest

• If a clause is unenforceable, it is severed and the rest of the agreement stands. A severed clause does not take the section around it with it.
• Not enforcing something once does not waive it.
• You may not transfer this agreement. We may transfer it if the game changes hands, and if we do we will say so in the app first, and it will not reduce your rights.
• These terms, the privacy policy and the Community Guidelines are the whole agreement about Driftile between you and us. Nothing said in a store listing, a screenshot or a patch note adds to it — though nothing in this bullet limits your rights where something we advertised turned out not to be true.
• These terms are written in English. A translation, if one is offered, is for convenience; where they differ, the English text governs — except where the law of your own country requires otherwise, in which case it does.

19. Contact

Omar Diar Bakerly (trading as Bakerly Apps)
Herwarthstraße 63, 47137 Duisburg
Germany
Email: [email protected]

Email reaches a person. Use it for anything in this document — an appeal under section 7.7, a purchase that did not deliver, a rights complaint, or a question about a clause.

The statutory provider identification (Anbieterkennzeichnung / Impressum under § 5 DDG) for Driftile is published in section 16 of the privacy policy and applies to this page equally.