What a membership will bring you
There is a way of building an online backgammon game that most of the industry has settled into. It puts something between you and the next game — a coin balance, a timer, a bundle, a screen you have to dismiss — and then sells you the way past it. It works. It is also why a lot of good players stopped playing backgammon online.
We are not building that. This page is where we say so, in writing, before the doors open, so you can hold us to it later.
What we will never do
We will never sell coins. No coins, no gems, no credits, no chips you top up. Nothing you buy to be allowed to keep playing.
We will never sell loot boxes. Nothing on GamesGrid is sold by chance.
We will never block you until you pay. No energy bar that runs out, no "come back in four hours", no wall in the middle of a session that asks for your card before you can roll again. If you sit down to play backgammon here, you play backgammon here.
We will never put advertising in the match screen. The board is the board.
Nothing you could ever pay for changes a roll or a move. Not the dice, not the strength of the player opposite you, not your rating, not a result. A paying member and a free player sit down to the same game, and the one who plays better wins it.
What GamesGrid is instead
GamesGrid is a backgammon server. You can play here for free, and the free game is the real game: the full tournament rules, a proper doubling cube, over 500 club members to sit down against — each with a face, a voice and a measured strength — and a review of every match the moment it ends. Those are not samples of a product behind a door. They are the product.
And what a membership will be, one day
There will be a membership, later. It will be the one place on GamesGrid where we ask for money, and it will buy more: extended features, more boards, more graphics — the things that cost real work to make and that a serious player will want around the game. It will never buy an edge in it.
What exactly falls inside the membership and what stays free is not decided, and we are not going to guess on this page. When it is settled, it will be written here in full, in plain language. Until then, the promise above is the whole story — and it does not change when the membership arrives.
Why we can afford to promise this
Because the club was like this before. The original GamesGrid ran from 1996 to 2008 as a room for people who took backgammon seriously, and it never needed to trick anyone into staying. The people who played there came back for the opponents and for the game, not because a balance had run low. The new GamesGrid is built by people who remember that — and who would rather have fewer players than the wrong kind of business.
Get invited
The doors open in stages, and the invitation list is the way in — for the first demo, for the opening, and for the news when the membership finally exists. Joining costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
