Terms of Service

King Barbu · last updated 6 October 2026

Who these terms are with

King Barbu is made by Riccardo Taglietti, an independent developer in the United States — called we below, although it is one person. These terms are an agreement between you and us, and they cover the King Barbu app and the kingbarbu.com website (together, the game).

By creating an account, joining a table as a guest, or otherwise using the game, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use it.

Who can play

You must be at least 13 to use the game — or older, if the age of digital consent where you live is higher, as it is in parts of the EEA. If you are under the age of majority where you live, a parent or guardian should read these terms with you and agree to them on your behalf.

The game is free

King Barbu is currently free to download and to play. In the future it may introduce advertising, optional purchases, subscriptions or other paid features. If it does, these terms will be updated first, and what costs what will be made clear before anyone is charged for anything.

Points, scores and results exist only inside the game. They are not money, cannot be exchanged for anything, and you must not wager on them with real money or anything else of value.

Accounts and guests

Playing on your own needs no account. Playing online needs either an account — by email, Apple or Google — or a guest seat taken from an invite link.

• Keep your sign-in to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account, and if you think someone else has got into it, change your password and tell us.
• Give an email address that is yours. Do not create multiple accounts to evade a suspension, manipulate matchmaking, or occupy multiple seats at the same table.
• A guest seat belongs to one table. Its name is gone when the table is, and there is nothing to recover afterwards.

Names

Your username, or the name you give as a guest, is shown to the other people at your table — at a public table, to strangers. It must not:

• be offensive, hateful, sexual or threatening, or harass anyone;
• pretend to be another person, a well-known figure, or us;
• advertise anything or carry a link, a handle or contact details;
• infringe somebody else's trademark or other rights.

Names are checked against a list of offensive words when they are saved, but no list is complete. We may change or remove a name that breaks these rules, and the account behind it if it keeps happening.

Playing fair

An online table is four people trusting that the cards fell the way they fell. So, at any table:

• Do not use software, scripts or bots to play for you, or to read, automate or alter the game.
• Do not try to see cards that are not yours, by any means — that includes tampering with the app, its network traffic, or the server it talks to.
• At a public table, do not collude: sitting several of your own accounts together, or sharing hands with another player, spoils the game for whoever is the fourth.
• If you find a bug that gives an advantage or exposes something it should not, tell us rather than using it. We will be grateful, not cross.
• Do not try to overload, disrupt, or get unauthorised access to the game or the services it runs on, or to copy, decompile or reverse-engineer it except where the law allows you to regardless.

Private tables are among friends, and how strictly you hold each other to the rules of play there is up to you. The rules against tampering with, disrupting or exploiting the app and its services, or gaining unauthorised access to them, apply at every table, private or public.

Leaving a table

Online, every turn runs on a clock. When yours runs out, the game plays a card for you so the others are not kept waiting. If it has to do that twice in a row, your seat is marked as away, and when the round ends you are taken off the table so someone else can sit down. Your name and score for that round stay on the scoreboard. This is how the game keeps moving; it is not a penalty, and you can always join another table.

Tables that stop moving are closed after six hours, and closed tables are deleted after thirty days, with their scores. Nothing about a table is kept forever, so if a result matters to you, take a screenshot.

Suspension and ending things

You can stop using the game whenever you like, and delete your account from Settings → Delete account.

If you break these terms — most of all the ones about names and fair play — we may take you off a table, rename you, or suspend or close your account. Where it is reasonable to, we will tell you why. If you think we got it wrong, write to us and it will be looked at again.

We may also change the game, or stop offering it, at any time. If the online game is ever shut down, you will be told in the app beforehand where that is possible. Playing on your own would keep working on the copy already on your phone.

What belongs to whom

King is a traditional card game, and its rules belong to nobody. The app itself — its code, its artwork, its design and the King Barbu name — belongs to us. You may use the app to play, for your own personal and non-commercial enjoyment, on any device you own or control; you may not copy, sell or redistribute it, or build anything from its parts.

The name you choose is yours. By using it in the game you allow us to show it to the other players at your tables, which is the only thing it is used for.

Things we rely on

The online game runs on services from other companies — Supabase, and Apple or Google if you sign in with them — and the website is hosted by Cloudflare. They are listed, with what each one does, in the Privacy Policy. If you sign in with Apple or Google, their own terms apply to that account too. We are not responsible for an outage or a change on their side, though we will do what we can about one.

The game is offered as it is

We work to keep the game fair, fast and running, but we cannot promise that it always will be. To the extent the law allows, the game is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including that it will be uninterrupted, free of bugs, or suitable for any particular purpose, or that a table or a score will be kept.

Limits on liability

To the extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss arising from the game, including lost scores, lost data or lost time. Our total liability to you for any claim arising from the game will not exceed US$50.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — such as for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence — and nothing takes away rights you have as a consumer under the law where you live. If you are in the UK or EEA, the statutory rights you have there apply in full, whatever these terms say.

Apple and Google

If you downloaded the app through the App Store or Google Play, that store's terms and licence terms also apply — on the App Store, Apple's standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement. These terms continue to govern your King Barbu account, online play, and the game's services and features.

The law that applies

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and applicable federal law of the United States, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If you are a consumer living elsewhere, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of your own country, and you may bring a claim in your own courts.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we do not enforce a term at some point, that does not mean we have given it up. You may not transfer these terms to anyone else; we may, if the game ever passes to someone who will keep running it.

Changes

If these terms change, the date at the top changes with it. Anything that materially affects you will be announced in the app before it takes effect, and continuing to play after that means you accept the new terms. If you do not, you can delete your account at any time.

Questions: support@kingbarbu.com