Fairness

Nothing turns on chance

Every game on FLIP is decided by what the players do. There is no deal, no spin and no draw that decides a result.

Where a game needs a starting position, such as a grid of letters, a set of square values or an opening letter, both players get the same one, at the same moment, before either of you can act on it.

The server is the only authority

Your device draws the board. It does not decide anything.

The server holds the state, validates every action against the rules before applying it, and sends each player only what they are entitled to know at that moment. A player never receives information they should not have. You are not sent the moment a reaction cue is about to fire, because your device is never told.

A modified client can therefore misbehave, but it cannot cheat: an action the rules do not allow is refused, and information that was never sent cannot be read out of the app.

How the prize is worked out

Every player pays the same entry fee. FLIP retains 5% of the total, with a floor of one coin, and the rest is the prize.

The prize shown on a game before you enter is produced by the same code that settles the contest and pays it. The two cannot drift apart, because there is only one of them.

A contest that cannot be completed is voided, every entry fee is returned in full, and nothing is retained. FLIP earns from contests that happened, not from contests that failed.

Practice opponents are always labelled

You can play alone against a computer opponent. It is always free, no prize is attached, and the result screen tells you plainly that your opponent was a bot.

A player who has just beaten a bot must never be left believing they beat somebody. That is the difference between a practice mode and a lie.

Where the money sits

Balances are derived from a double-entry ledger rather than stored as a number and edited. Entry fees move into escrow when you join a contest and out of it when the contest settles.

Every entry is append-only, so a correction is a reversing entry and never an edit, and every transaction must balance to zero, which the database enforces rather than the application. A nightly check reconciles the ledger against the balances it produces.