The Covenants

Two promises, written down before we had anything to sell and before anyone was here to hold us to them. They are published so that they can be quoted back at us.

The Fairness Covenant

No purchase will ever grant board advantage, resources, turns, army, information, or convenience competitors can feel.

Pawnborn intends to make money the way a game should be allowed to: by selling things that look good. Heraldry and banners, the architecture of your kingdom, the theme of your court, the illumination on your chronicle pages. Cosmetics, sold directly — no loot boxes, no randomised anything, no ads.

What is never for sale: turns, time, resources, soldiers, training, information, intelligence, matchmaking, or relief from any consequence. And the rarest, best-looking things in the game cannot be bought at any price — they are earned by doing something difficult, and that is the point of them. Money buys beauty; only play buys glory.

This is not only ethics. In a market full of pay-to-win strategy games and chess cheating scandals, provable fairness is the most interesting thing we can offer.

And a promise about who you are playing

Your chess rating in Pawnborn moves only when two human beings play each other. No rating point is ever minted against a machine. When a seat is filled by a defence fighting for a sleeping player, the game says so on the board, before the first move, to both players and to anyone watching. There are no disguised bots, and there never will be.

The Casual Covenant

You do not need to be good at chess to be great at Pawnborn.

Most people are not good at chess. A game built on chess that only rewards strong players is a game for a few thousand people, and we are not building that. So:

• Everyone starts on small boards. A whole world of players learns together rather than beginners being alone on the shallow end.
• The board is sized to protect the weaker hand, automatically. There is nothing to configure and nothing to know.
• Half the game ignores your rating entirely — growing a kingdom, running spies, exploring, holding a council seat, organising a war.
• Losing is survivable by construction. Sleeping through a battle costs you no rating. Broken soldiers come home. Ruins refund. There is a floor under how much you can lose.
• Every skill level has a real crown. The Arbiter recognises no difference between a perfect game on twenty-five squares and one on sixty-four, and neither do we.

We test against two questions rather than one. Not just "is this fun?" but "is this still fun for someone rated 700 who loses half their games?" If a feature's payoff only lands for strong players, the feature is wrong.

Why publish these now

Because promises made before launch are cheap to make and expensive to break, which is exactly the property you want. Every one of these is a design constraint we have already built against — not marketing copy written after the fact to describe whatever we happened to ship.