Terms of Use

The short version

These Terms are the agreement between you and Too Much Smart, LLC ("TMS," "we," "us"), a small, independent studio in Currituck County, North Carolina, when you use toomuchsmart.com, toomuchstupid.com, or any of our apps and games. We've tried to write them so you can actually read them. The gist:

• One account, one real person, with true information about yourself.
• Play fair. No cheats, hacks, bots or modified games, and no making or selling them. This is the rule we enforce hardest, because one cheater ruins a game for everyone in it.
• Be decent to the people you play with. Trash talk between friends is part of games. Going after people isn't.
• What you make is yours, and what we make is ours. You're welcome to stream and post videos of our games.
• We never sell your personal information.
• Break the rules that matter and you lose your account, along with what you paid for.

The sections below say all of this more carefully. Some games and apps have rules of their own, shown in them; where those are more specific than these Terms, they win. These Terms work together with our Privacy Policy and Intellectual Property Policy.

1. Who can use our sites

You must be at least 13. Our sites aren't for children under 13, and we don't knowingly allow them to have accounts. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13, we close it and delete its information.

If you're 13 to 17, a parent or guardian has to agree to these Terms with you, and they're responsible for what you buy and for how you use your account. Parents: some of our games let players talk to each other in chat. If you'd like your child's account closed, contact us and we'll close it.

Follow the law where you are. You're responsible for whether using our sites is legal where you live. You can't use them if US law bars you from receiving them (US sanctions, for example).

2. Your account

One account works across all of our sites, Too Much Smart's and Too Much Stupid's alike.

• Tell the truth about yourself. The name and information you give us have to be true and accurate.
• One person per account, and one account per person. Don't share your account, and don't sell, buy, rent or hand one off.
• No extra accounts to get around a pause or a ban, to get an edge in a game (filling a room, boosting a record, playing against yourself), or to get more of something that's limited to one per person, like a free trial.
• No bots or automated accounts.
• Your email is the key to your account, since that's how you sign in. Keep that email account secure, and contact us right away if you think someone else got into yours.

You're responsible for what happens on your account.

3. Playing fair

Our games are made to be played together. A cheater doesn't just beat the people they play; they ruin the game for everyone in it, and they drive away the players who make online play worth having. So you agree not to:

• use cheats, hacks, trainers, aimbots, wallhacks, radar or ESP tools, or anything else that plays for you or shows you what the game doesn't (other players behind cover, hidden traps, anything the game keeps out of sight);
• change a game's code, data or memory while it runs, including through your browser's developer tools, its console, extensions or user scripts, or play through a modified or unofficial version of a game;
• read, change, replay or fake the traffic between a game and our servers;
• use bots, scripts or macros that play for you, or automate your input beyond what a game itself offers;
• use bugs or glitches to get an advantage (if you find one, tell us; don't use it or spread it);
• disrupt other players' connections or our servers: flooding, lag switching, attacks on our services;
• fix matches, trade wins, throw games, or play on someone else's account to raise their record;
• get around anything that protects our games or sites: sign-in tickets, the servers' checks, anti-cheat, rate limits, or what's limited to members; or
• make, sell, give away, advertise or support cheats, hacks, bots or unofficial versions of our games.

What's fine:

• cheats a game offers itself (cheat codes in a solo mode, for example), used where the game allows them;
• tools that help you play without playing for you: screen readers, magnifiers, controller remapping and other accessibility tools, and browser extensions that don't touch our games.

Not sure about something? Ask us before you use it.

How we keep play fair. Our online games are decided on our servers; your browser shows the game and sends your moves. Our servers may record what happens in a game (moves, shots, results, and what each player could see), and we review those records when something looks wrong or someone reports a player.

What happens to cheaters. Depending on what happened, you may be removed from a match or room, have your results and records wiped, be paused from online play, or lose your account. Cheating on purpose is not something we warn about first: we can go straight to ending your account, and you lose what you paid for (Section 8).

Making or selling cheats breaks these Terms and harms our games, our players and us, in ways money alone can't fix. Besides ending the accounts involved, we may take legal action, including asking a court to order it stopped.

4. Rooms, friends and chat

• Rooms are for playing with people you know. In the Game Room, you open a room, invite friends, and play together. A room's host chooses how the controllers pass and can remove people from the room; someone the host removes can't come back into that room.
• Who can invite you is your choice, set in your own settings.
• You're responsible for what you do, not for what your friends do. Inviting someone doesn't make you answerable for them; everyone is responsible for their own behavior.
• Chat is kept. Chat in rooms and games is logged so that we can look into a report about it. Anyone in a room can see what's said there, so don't share private information in chat.

5. How to behave here

Disagreement, competition and trash talk between friends are part of playing games. Going after people isn't. You may not use our sites to:

• break the law;
• harass, threaten, bully or hound someone, including someone who's asked you to stop;
• attack people for their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or age;
• post someone's private information (their address, phone number, real name where they haven't shared it, and the like);
• pretend to be someone else, including anyone at TMS;
• scam or phish people, spam, or spread malware;
• scrape our sites (use bots or scripts to copy content, data or other players' information); or
• post nudity or sexual content of any kind, anywhere: in chat, on the forums, or in names and profile pictures. Teenagers play here.

Names and profile pictures follow the same rules, and we may change or remove one that doesn't.

The bright line: no sexual content involving minors, in any form whatsoever (real, drawn, AI-generated or fictional), and no using our sites to seek sexual contact with a minor. We remove it, end the account, and report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), as the law requires. Credible threats of violence go to law enforcement.

Reporting. Report a player or a post with a game's report tools where it has them, or through the Contact page. Disagreement isn't a violation: reports are for actual rule-breaking.

What happens. We may remove content, warn you, pause your account or features, or end your account, depending on how serious it was and whether it's a pattern. The bright line ends accounts the first time.

6. Your content, and ours

What you make is yours: posts, chat, pictures, lists, and whatever you make or keep with our apps. By putting it on our sites, you give us the limited permission we need to run them: to store it, keep backups, and show and deliver it to the people you chose. We don't claim ownership of it, and we don't sell it.

Ideas and feedback. Players help shape how our games get made, and we're glad of it. If you send us ideas, suggestions or feedback, we can use them freely, without owing you anything. Please don't send us anything confidential.

What we make is ours. Our games, apps, code, art, music, sounds, names and logos belong to TMS. Too Much Smart, Too Much Stupid and our games' names are our trademarks. We give you a personal, non-commercial permission to use our sites, apps and games as these Terms allow, and we can take it back if you break them. You may not:

• copy, mirror or host our games or apps anywhere else;
• decompile or reverse engineer them, or pull out their code, art, sounds or other assets, except where the law lets you regardless of these Terms;
• use our code or assets to build another game or service; or
• use our names or logos in a way that suggests we're behind, or endorse, something we aren't.

Videos and streams are welcome. You can stream, record and post videos and screenshots of our games, and make money from them through ads, sponsorships or tips, as long as you don't suggest TMS endorses you and you don't hand out the game itself. We may ask you to take down a video that breaks these Terms (one that shows off or teaches a cheat, for example).

7. Copyright

Post only what you have the right to share. Other people's work isn't yours to publish just because you can.

If you believe content on our sites infringes your copyright, send a notice to our designated agent:

Too Much Smart, LLC: Copyright Agent
P.O. Box 161
Jarvisburg, NC 27947
support@toomuchsmart.com

Include what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act asks for: identification of the copyrighted work; where the material is on our sites (a link is best); your name, address, email and, if you have one, phone number; a statement that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorized by the copyright owner, their agent, or the law; a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the notice is accurate and that you're the owner or authorized to act for them; and your physical or electronic signature. We'll remove or disable access to the material and tell the person who posted it.

If your content was removed and you believe that was a mistake or misidentification, you can send a counter-notice to the same agent: identify the removed material and where it appeared; state, under penalty of perjury, your good-faith belief that it was removed by mistake or misidentification; include your name, address and phone number, your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for your district (or, if you're outside the US, for the Eastern District of North Carolina), and your agreement to accept service from the person who filed the notice; and sign it. Unless the person who filed the notice tells us they've gone to court, we may restore the material in 10 to 14 business days.

Repeat infringers lose their accounts. Knowingly false notices and counter-notices carry legal liability under the DMCA, so don't send one.

8. Paying for things

Some of what we make costs money, and the price is always shown before you pay.

• Your card stays with the processor. Payments are handled by Stripe, on its own pages. We never see or store your card number.
• Tokens are bought with money and used in our games (today, for extra swaps in Smartichoke and extra games in Duel of Words). A token isn't money: it has no cash value, can't be sold, traded, transferred or turned back into money, and is a permission to use something in our games, not property. We may change what tokens can be used for, but we won't take away tokens you bought except as these Terms say. If we ever stop offering tokens altogether, we'll give you notice and time to use them.
• Subscriptions. Anything we sell as a subscription says before you pay how it renews and what it costs. You can cancel any time from your account; canceling stops the next charge, and the time you've paid for runs to its end.
• Refunds. Purchases are final, except where a charge went wrong or the law requires a refund. If something went wrong, contact us and a person will look.
• Disputed charges. If you dispute a charge with your bank or card issuer, what that charge bought is removed while the dispute is open, and for good if the charge is reversed.
• Prices can change, but a change never applies to what you've already paid for.
• If we end your account for breaking these Terms (cheating included), you lose your tokens and any paid time you have left, with no refund.

9. Closing your account, and when we close it

You can delete your account any time, no reason needed, from your account page. If something keeps it from being deleted, the page says what; sort that out, or contact us. A few records stay after an account is gone: what the law requires us to keep (payments and taxes, for example) and records of reports and bans.

We may pause or end your account if you break these Terms, if the law requires it, or to protect our players or our services. We may close an account that's gone unused for a long time, after emailing you first. We may also change or stop offering any site, app, game or feature; if we shut down something you've paid for, we'll give you notice first.

10. The necessary legal parts

Our sites are provided "as is" and "as available." We work hard to keep them reliable, secure and free of glitches, but we can't promise they will always be. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, including the warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.

Our liability is limited. To the fullest extent the law allows, TMS isn't liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost data or lost profits, and our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the greater of what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or $50. Some places don't allow certain limits, so parts of this may not apply to you.

You're responsible for what you do here. If your use of our sites, or your breaking these Terms, leads to a claim against us, you agree to cover our reasonable costs, including legal fees, to the extent the law allows.

These Terms may change. When we make a meaningful change, we'll tell you on our sites or by email before it takes effect, and the version date at the top of this page changes. If you keep using our sites after a change takes effect, you agree to the new Terms.

Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of North Carolina, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

Disputes. First, the honest why: we'd rather fix a problem than fight over it, but defending even a meritless lawsuit can cost enough to end a small studio. So disputes work like this:

• We talk first. Before either of us starts a formal case, we agree to write to the other (for us, support@toomuchsmart.com) and spend 30 days genuinely trying to resolve it.
• Small claims court is always open. Either of us can bring an individual case in small claims court instead of arbitration.
• Everything else goes to individual arbitration. You and TMS resolve disputes through binding arbitration: like a court case, but decided by a single neutral arbitrator instead of a judge and jury; faster, less formal, and final. Arbitration is administered by JAMS under its applicable arbitration rules and its Consumer Arbitration Minimum Standards, by documents, phone or video unless an in-person hearing is required, and then somewhere reasonably convenient to you. Your share of the fees is capped at what those consumer standards set, about the cost of filing a court case, and TMS pays the rest. If JAMS can't or won't administer a dispute, National Arbitration and Mediation (NAM) administers it under its own consumer rules and standards instead. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.
• Disputes are individual, with no class actions. Claims are brought and resolved one person at a time, not as class or representative actions, and the same limit applies to our claims against you.
• Mass filings follow the administrator's published process. If many similar claims arrive from the same or coordinated lawyers, they proceed under JAMS's published Mass Arbitration Procedures and Guidelines (or NAM's equivalent rules, if NAM is administering), which stage the cases instead of deciding them all at once.
• You can opt out. If you don't want arbitration, email support@toomuchsmart.com within 30 days of creating your account (or of these Terms first applying to you, if you had an account before then). Your name, your account email, and that you're opting out is enough. It costs nothing and changes nothing else about your account.
• Where court applies. If you opted out, if a claim isn't subject to arbitration, or if either of us goes to court to stop ongoing harm or the misuse of intellectual property (making or selling cheats for our games, for example), the case belongs exclusively in the state courts of North Carolina sitting in Currituck County, or the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, and both of us consent to those courts, except for small claims, which proceed where small claims cases normally do. Nothing in this section stops you from reporting anything to a government agency.
• If the no-class rule fails. If a court finds the class-action waiver unenforceable for some dispute, arbitration doesn't apply to that dispute; it goes to the courts above instead. The rest of these Terms stands either way.

The rest. If part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we don't enforce a rule right away, we can still enforce it later. These Terms, the Privacy Policy and the Intellectual Property Policy are the whole agreement between you and TMS about our sites.

11. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Use the Contact page, email support@toomuchsmart.com, or write to us:

Too Much Smart, LLC
P.O. Box 161
Jarvisburg, NC 27947