Questions

A square on our map, and nothing else. This is a symbolic entertainment product. You are not buying ownership of anything, and the purchase gives you no right, title or claim to any real land, sea, seabed or airspace anywhere on Earth. You are buying a licence to show a name, a link and a drawing on one square of our map, and nothing else. The certificate says the same thing in the same words.

Yes, because what you buy is a square on our map and not the place itself. 5 073 960 squares are on sale: 1 471 973 on land and 3 601 987 at sea, and every one of them can be picked on the map. A sea square gives you no right to any water, seabed, fishing, navigation or resource, and no maritime claim of any kind. Antarctica is governed by the Antarctic Treaty; buying a square over it changes nothing about that, and we make no claim there and grant none.

Land squares show the nearest town, the region and the country, in 234 countries and territories. Sea squares show the name of the sea or ocean instead (295 named seas and oceans from Natural Earth; a few squares far from any named sea say "Open ocean"). Antarctica and 13 areas that carry no country code in the public map data, Somaliland and Northern Cyprus among them, show the name of the area and no country. We never assign one. That is not a political position, a recognition or a denial of recognition; it is simply what the map data says, and it is not ours to decide.

Almost, and we would rather say so than round it up. A row of the grid is 0.09 degrees of latitude tall, which is 9.95 km at the equator and 10.05 km near the poles. The number of columns in a row follows the cosine of the latitude, so the width stays close to ten kilometres: across every square on sale it runs from 10.02 to 10.06 km. Over Bratislava a square is 10.04 × 10.01 km. The real size of your square is printed on your certificate, and we never write "exactly 10 × 10 km" anywhere.

That is a fair thing to think, so here is the plain answer. We sell a place on our own map and a certificate with a number on it, and nothing more than that. It is a small, cheap, honest piece of entertainment, like having a star named after you, except we say what it is on the buy button instead of hiding it in the terms. If you buy one and decide it was silly, write to us and we send the money back, beyond what the law asks of us.

No. This is the line we will not cross. A paid square cannot be taken or repainted by another player, by a weekly event or by a season. The only thing that can change it is moderation, if the drawing breaks the content rules, and then you get a written reason and can appeal.

The licence runs for as long as we run the service and at least until 31 December 2029. "Forever" is a promise a one person company cannot keep, so we do not make it. If we ever stop, we tell every owner by e-mail at least 60 days ahead and the certificates stay valid as what they are, a keepsake.

A few, for a technical reason and not a commercial one. The map uses the Mercator projection, which ends at 85.05 degrees of latitude, so 18 994 of the 5 092 954 squares in the grid, the ones closest to the two poles, sit outside the map. We do not sell those: you could never look at the square you paid for. That leaves 5 073 960 squares on sale, and the map says the same thing if you click one of the closed ones. 140 698 remote squares that are on sale have no town within 300 km; their certificate leaves the town out rather than inventing one.

No, and we would rather lose the sale than pretend otherwise. Every outgoing link carries rel="nofollow ugc". We also remove links used for spam, malware or unrelated advertising, and links that pretend to be somebody else.

No. Slovak gambling law needs chance and a prize at the same time. You choose the square yourself, at a fixed price, and nothing is drawn and nothing is won. That is also why there will never be a random pack of parcels or a paid raffle for territory.

No. The licence is not transferable and there is no marketplace. The moment parcels become something people speculate on, the project turns into the thing we are trying not to be.

Checkout asks you to confirm that you are 18 or that you have the cardholder’s consent. If a parent writes to us because a child paid without asking, we refund it. We do not argue about that.

Your e-mail and your billing country, plus the name, link and drawing you choose and the two consents from checkout. The billing address you type at checkout stays with Stripe, which keeps it as the evidence of where the buyer is that tax rules ask for; we store only the country. No phone number, no password and no account: the only way in is a link with a long random key that we e-mail you.

We draw it ourselves, in your browser, from Natural Earth, which is public domain: coastlines, lakes, the borders of every country, regional borders and town names, in three levels of detail that load as you zoom. There is no third party tile server, so nothing outside our control can take the map down. The list of 28 669 towns used for search comes from Natural Earth and from GeoNames, licensed CC BY 4.0. The projection is Mercator, which is not a fashion choice: it is conformal, so a square on the ground is a square on your screen at every zoom.

Yes. Digital content that you agreed to receive immediately has no 14 day cooling off period in law, and you will confirm that at checkout. We give the money back anyway if you write to us and say you changed your mind. It costs us less than an unhappy customer.