Rules

The contest

• Nine Trials is a free puzzle contest run by Wrong Way Wonders. Entering costs nothing, and nothing in it is for sale.
• The prize is $69, for the first player to clear all nine stages. There is one prize and one winner.
• "First" means the earliest finish recorded by the game's server. That record is final.
• The contest runs from launch until the prize is claimed. The hall of fame stays open after that.

Who can enter

• Anyone can play. To claim the prize you must be 18 or older, or have permission from a parent or guardian.
• You cannot claim the prize if contests like this are not allowed where you live, or if we cannot legally send you money there.
• One account per person.

Fair play

You will be disqualified, and may be banned, for:

• using more than one account;
• bots, scripts, auto-clickers or any tool that plays for you;
• exploiting bugs, or tampering with the game or its server;
• getting a winner code any way other than finishing the game yourself;
• pretending to be another player.

We can review any finish before the prize is paid. A finish that broke these rules does not count.

Claiming the prize

• Clear the last stage and you get a winner code. Send it to wrongwaywonders on Discord within 30 days.
• We check the code against the game's records before paying.
• The prize is paid by PayPal, or another method we agree with you, within 14 days of checking. Any tax on the prize where you live is yours to handle.
• If the first finisher does not claim within 30 days, cannot claim, or is disqualified, the prize goes to the next finisher who can.

The Terminal is an AI

• The voice you talk to in The Terminal (stage 4) is generated by an AI model: Claude, made by Anthropic. Inside the game it stays in character and will not say so. That is part of the puzzle.
• What you type there is sent to Anthropic to generate the replies, and is stored with your account. Do not type anything personal.

Your data

• We store your username, your passcode (scrambled one way, so we cannot read it), your progress and times, and what you type in The Terminal. Your IP address is used to block abuse and appears in server logs.
• The hall of fame publicly shows the username and finishing time of the first 100 players to finish.
• Your data is shared only with the services that run the game: Fly.io (hosting) and Anthropic (The Terminal). It is never sold.
• To have your account deleted, message wrongwaywonders on Discord.

The small print

• This contest is not sponsored, endorsed or run by YouTube, Discord, Anthropic or anyone else. Characters and images that appear in the game belong to their owners. This is an independent fan-made game, not connected to them.
• If something goes wrong (bugs, outages, attacks or cheating on a large scale), we may pause, fix, change or end the contest, and we will say how the prize is handled.
• We may update these rules. This page always shows the current version. Our decisions about the contest are final.