$ cat rules.md

The rules

All six of them. If they change, this page changes first.

1. rule 01

   Likes are your rank

   Post one tweet announcing your game and paste the link. Every like on that tweet is a point, and the board sorts by points. Ties break by who listed first.

   That's the whole algorithm.

2. rule 02

   The tweet is the price of admission

   No signup, no payment, no account. Your tweet must name indie.game and link your game — that's how we verify the listing is yours. One tweet carries one listing, and one game gets one row.

   $0 spent, ever.

3. rule 03

   The count is the tweet's count

   Likes are re-counted straight from the tweet every ten minutes — nobody controls that number, not us, not you. Delete the tweet and your row keeps its last count; it just stops climbing.

   Rank you can audit from your own timeline.

4. rule 04

   It must actually be a game

   Any indie game qualifies — AI-built, engine-made, hand-coded, or vibe-coded at 3am. Browser, iOS, Android — anywhere people can actually play it. If it turns out not to be a real game, we delist it.

   This is a leaderboard, not a link farm.

5. rule 05

   One score, and an honest count

   Rank is likes, and likes live in public on your tweet — anyone can open it and count. Plays sit beside them as a quieter number: an outbound click to your own site, counted server-side, deduplicated per person per day, and never reset. We never embed your game, so the traffic and the analytics are yours.

   Likes decide the rank. Plays tell you if it landed.

6. rule 06

   The board is the only board

   No paid placement, no hidden rows, no algorithmic feed underneath. One page, one ranking, sorted by likes — and every row links straight to a game you can play before deciding it deserved them.

   If it's not on the board, it doesn't exist.