Rules & FAQ

One of five reasons, and the panel tells you which.

• It is not a single rectangle. Scattered pixels are not a selection.
• A side is under 2 pixels. A one-pixel hairline carries no legible content and exists only to deface.
• The area is under 16 pixels.
• It runs off the edge of the board.
• It totals less than $2.00. On untouched board that means the smallest thing you can buy is 200 pixels — a 10×10 square comes to $1.00 and gets refused. We tell you to select more rather than quietly charging $2.00 for $1.00 of pixels.

Because people have fought over it. A pixel’s price is a fact about its history and nothing else. Every takeover multiplies it by 1.5 and it does not come back down on its own. Somewhere on this board is a corner nobody has touched, and it is still 1¢.

You have found orphaned paint — what a retired claim left behind. Those pixels keep their colour and they keep their price, so taking them costs the same 1.5× as anything else. The territory remembers the fight even after the claim is gone.

Money. That is the only defence anyone gets here, including you. They pay 1.5× what you paid, they clear the $2.00 minimum, and they do it as one rectangle — so nobody can pepper single pixels through your logo on the cheap.

A narrow strip carved through the middle of your artwork, though, is entirely legal. It is the best move in the game and it is priced accordingly.

Buy them again. They belong to someone else now, so you pay the escalated price like anyone else would. Same rule that let you take them in the first place.

No. There are no notifications of any kind — no email, no alerts. The board is the only record. Anyone can take your pixels at any moment, and the first you will know of it is when you look.

Yes, and the price does not escalate. Re-buying a pixel you already hold refreshes it at what you last paid.

That is deliberate. Without it, anyone could bid against themselves until a region was unaffordable to everybody — a cheap way to buy permanence on a board whose entire premise is that nothing is permanent.

Worth knowing: a re-buy creates a new claim rather than editing the old one, and the old one shrinks accordingly. Swapping the label on a claim you already hold, in place, is not built yet.

Then you stay. No rent, no expiry, no renewal, no time limit. A claim ends when somebody outbids it and not before.

Yes, in a single purchase. There is no per-transaction cap: drag the whole 45×45 and it quotes $20.25 for all 2,025 pixels. That is the price of an untouched board; anything already claimed costs 1.5× whatever its holder paid, so in practice it climbs.

You would then own every pixel, and every one of them would be something the next person can take off you at 1.5× the price. Owning the whole board buys you a very large target, not a moat. We are not going to stop you.

No. You hold the right to set the colour, label and link on that rectangle, from the moment your payment lands until someone buys it out from under you. That is the whole of it. No deed, no asset, nothing to resell.

No, and the reason matters. Your payment buys a specific, deterministic outcome: those pixels, at that price, immediately. You see the exact rectangle and the exact total before you pay, and you get precisely that.

No chance element. No prize pool, no draw, no random allocation, nothing to win. Someone painting over you later is not a losing outcome — it is the thing we told you would happen, on a screen where you had to tick a box saying you understood it.

No. You get a colour, a label of up to 40 characters, and an https link. Image uploads are switched off at the moment; they come back when the review pipeline behind them is something we can genuinely staff.

Links pass through a warning page and carry nofollow noopener noreferrer. Shorteners and anything that trips a safety check go to a human before they go live. The banned list is in the Terms and it holds no surprises.

Every claim has a report button on its hover card. Reports land in a moderation queue that gets read daily.

When we clear a region we reset its prices to zero as well. Otherwise removing the worst thing on the board would leave an expensive dead patch nobody could afford to replace, and whoever put it there would have bought a permanent scar for the price of one purchase.

Not for being painted over. That is the product working, not the product failing.

Three cases refund in full, automatically, without you having to ask:

• Your hold expired and someone else took the area before your payment landed.
• A moderator cleared the region while your payment was in flight.
• We removed your claim over a mistake that was ours, not yours.

The rule underneath all three: if we can give you exactly what you paid for, we do. If we cannot, you get all of your money back. Never a partial claim, never a price you did not agree to. Payments run through Stripe and we never see your card.