Draft of 13 November 2026. Not yet in force and not reviewed by a lawyer. Text marked like this is a placeholder for something not yet decided.
Couch Golf Club
Terms
The rules of the club, in plain words. By playing you agree to them.
The game
Couch Golf Club is a golf game played in a browser. It is free. Nothing in it can be bought today, and nothing that could ever be bought will affect how the ball flies or what you score.
It is an early version. It can change, be unavailable, or lose data without notice. In particular, when the game's physics is updated, a round in progress may be discarded and earlier rounds may stop being watchable; their scores stand.
The daily competition
- Each day has three holes (the day turns over at 00:00 UTC), played two ways.
- Practice is open to everyone, with no account, as often as you like. It is not ranked; you are told where your score sits among the day's practice rounds.
- The round that counts is played signed in, on its own pins and in its own wind, which are the same for every player and are shown to you only when you tee off. One attempt each. A stroke counts the moment it is played and cannot be taken back.
- The server replays every stroke and alone decides the score. If it does not accept a stroke, the stroke does not count.
- There are no prizes and no entry fees.
Play fair
Do not:
- have more than one account, or learn the round that counts from someone who has played it;
- let a program play for you, or send the server strokes you did not play in the game;
- use someone else's account, or try to get into one;
- attack, overload or probe the server.
We may remove scores and accounts that break these rules. We decide, and we will be reasonable about it.
Names
Your name is shown to everyone. It must not be offensive, must not pretend to be another person or to speak for the game, and must not be an advertisement or a web address. We may rename or remove a player whose name breaks this, and stop the name being used again.
Your account
An account is a name with a way back in: a passkey, an email address, or both. Keep at least one of them working: if the only passkey is lost and there is no email address on the account, we cannot give it back. You can delete your account at any time; the privacy page says what that removes.
Your rounds
By playing a ranked round you agree that its scores are shown on the leaderboard under your name and that other players may watch it played back, until you delete your account.
What we promise, and what we do not
We will run the game with care. It is provided as it is, with no promise that it will always be available, free of faults, or that scores and rounds will be kept. As far as the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from playing it. Nothing here takes away rights the law gives you as a consumer.
[FOR A LAWYER: this limit of liability, which country's law governs these terms (the company is in the United Arab Emirates; most players will not be), and where a dispute would be heard.]
Changes
If these terms change, this page changes and the date at the top with it.
Contact
Couch Golf Club is run by Fractal Technologies - FZCO.
hello@couch.golf
Credits
Course data
The outlines of greens, fairways, tees, bunkers and paths, and the line of each hole, are © OpenStreetMap contributors and are used under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Terrain is from the US Geological Survey, and imagery from the US Department of Agriculture; both are in the public domain.
We corrected the outlines by hand where they did not match the ground. The corrected outlines are available to anyone who asks, free of charge, under the same Open Database Licence. Write to hello@couch.golf and say which course you would like; we will send its outlines as GeoJSON.
Sound
The recorded sounds were generated for the game; wind and roll are synthesised as you play. No recordings by others are used.
Software
The game is drawn with three.js and signs players in with SimpleWebAuthn, both under the MIT licence.