Legal notice
Who publishes this site, what it does with your data, and whom it owes its drawings to.
Publisher
This site is published by Nicolas Lion, a sole trader operating as NLION INFORMATIQUE. PlayAwale is a free game, with no advertising.
SIRET (French business registration) : 983 367 780 00019
Address : Cité des Alouettes, 49270 Orée-d'Anjou, France
Publication director : Nicolas Lion
Phone : +33 6 95 38 15 89
Contact : contact@nlion.fr
Host
SAS o2switch
222-224 boulevard Gustave Flaubert, 63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
Phone : +33 4 44 44 60 40
Online play does not go through this host: its relay runs on the publisher's own personal server, home.nlion.fr, self-hosted and administered by the publisher in France.
Your data
Nothing below is an intention: every sentence describes what the site does today. The day one of these points changes, this page changes the same day.
At a glance
| What is kept | Why | For how long |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing at all, if you play without an account | No cookie, no record in your name | — |
| Your email address, your nickname, your avatar | To send you your sign-in link, and to name you to your friends | Until you close the account |
| Your profile number, on the games you finish | To give you your record in “My statistics” | The games remain, detached from you |
| The levels you have beaten and your achievements, with their date | Keeping your badge collection, and showing it to your friends | Until you close the account |
| Your Elo rating, and the games that made it | Calculate your rating, and show it to your friends | Until you close your account |
| Your bot: what it has learned from your play, and the games played against it | Let you play against yourself — and, if you share it, let other players take it on | Until you remove it or close the account |
| The link between your profile and your friend's, and its date | To keep your friend list and your invitations to play | Until one of you removes the other |
| An irreversible fingerprint of your IP address — never the address | To spot an abnormal flood of submissions, and place your games in the country ranking | One year |
| In-game messages | Talking during a network game | Nothing is kept |
| Your tournaments: registrations, results, fair-play promise | Running the rounds, ranking, paying out the pot; showing registered players who is playing | Until you close your account; your line stays in the standings, without a name |
| Pages viewed: the page, the time, the country, the device | To know how the site is used, and improve it | One year |
Giving nothing
PlayAwale is played without signing up. As long as you have no account, the site places no cookie on your device — not a single one.
The account
Opening an account records your email address, and nothing else: no password, no name, no date of birth. You sign in through a single-use link sent to that address, valid for one hour; after that it no longer opens.
You choose a nickname and an avatar. They name you to your friends — and, as soon as you play online, to your opponent: they and the game's spectators see your avatar, your nickname and your country, whether they are your friends or not. That is what tells you apart from a stranger. Without an account, nothing at all is announced about you. They are published on no page of the site and indexed by no search engine.
An account places two cookies: the one that keeps you signed in on this device, and the one for your country. The session lasts a year on a device you declare as yours, twelve hours otherwise. Of the sign-in token the site keeps only an irreversible fingerprint, its date and its expiry — never the token itself.
The publisher may refuse to open an account to an email address for which abuse has been observed. That address is then kept in a refusal list, which serves no other purpose.
Your friends
Adding a friend records the link between your two profiles, how it was made — a friend code, or a game played together — and its date. Removing a friend erases that link on both sides: it disappears from their list too.
A friend sees your nickname, your avatar, your country, whether you are online, and your badges. They see your statistics and your games — including your finest game — only if you allow it, from the settings in your space: both stay closed until you open them.
Your games
Recorded games carry no name. If you have an account, the ones you finish carry your profile number, and nothing else: that is what allows your record to be given back to you. The IP address is never kept in the clear: only an irreversible fingerprint is. It serves to spot an abnormal flood of submissions, and lets the publisher group in the statistics the anonymous games played from the same connection — without knowing who uses it.
Your country is derived from your IP address by a table hosted on our own servers: no request goes out to an outside service. It serves to place your games in the country ranking, and to show your flag to your friends.
Your badges
Beating an AI level records a badge: the level’s code and the date. Nothing else — neither how the game went, nor your score. Badges exist only for accounts. They are deleted with your profile.
Your achievements — first game, days in a row, great moves, online games, friends… — are worked out from your games, your Elo rating and your friends list, which are already kept. For each one we record its name, the date and, if there is one, the game that earned it: nothing more.
Your badges are visible to your friends, and to them alone: there is no box to tick, because a badge exists only to be shown to the people you have accepted. Your finest game, however, is still a game: it is shown only if you have opened your games to your friends. A visitor who is not your friend learns nothing about you on that page — no name, no avatar, no country.
Your Elo rating
If you have an account, your rated games — against the AIs, or online against a player who also has an account — calculate an Elo rating. For each one, we keep the opponent (the AI level, or “a player”, without their name), their rating, the result, and your rating before and after. Nothing else. It is all deleted with your profile.
Your rating is visible to your friends, like your badges, and to them only. The games that made it are shown to no one.
Your bot
If you have an account, you can create your bot: an AI that learns to play like you. It is only created with your consent, asked for in solo mode. To learn, it reads the moves of your last 150 finished games on this account, and keeps only a summary: the moves you play in openings and endgames, and a few settings describing how you play — caution, risk-taking, a taste for kroos. Games played against it are kept separately: they count neither towards your Elo nor in the site's statistics. You can remove it whenever you like, from its card in solo mode: what it has learned and every game played against it are then erased. It also goes when your account is closed.
By default, only you can play against it. If you share it — which requires a calculated Elo — it appears in the “Other players' bots” list in solo mode, with your nickname, your avatar, your country and your Elo, and every visitor can play against it, with or without an account. You see how those games went, without the names of those who played them. You stop sharing it in one click, from its card or from “My bot”.
A game against a bot can be replayed through a randomly drawn link that cannot be guessed, and that link can be shared, on social networks for example. Whoever opens it sees the moves, the player's avatar — never their name — and the bot owner's nickname and avatar.
A visitor without an account who plays a shared bot receives no cookie. Their game is kept for 90 days, with nothing that identifies them, so it can be replayed through its link and counted in the bot's record, then erased. An irreversible fingerprint of their IP address is attached for 24 hours, to limit the number of submissions, then erased.
Online play
An online game goes through that relay, installed on home.nlion.fr. It passes the moves, the portrait, the country and the name of each player, along with their moods, to both players and to the spectators, and keeps the clock. It knows neither account nor email address, writes nothing to a database, and forgets the room shortly after the game ends. Like any web server, the one receiving the connection sees your IP address and records it in its technical logs.
So that a game left halfway still counts, the relay itself sends the site the course of each game: the moves, the clocks and, where relevant, the forfeit. A player who has been away for more than 60 minutes, or who has had the move for as long without playing, loses the game; its moves are then not kept. To know who held each seat, the site keeps the link between your profile and the game in progress for 24 hours, then deletes it. The relay also sends each player’s IP address, which the site immediately turns into a country: only the country is kept with the game, never the address.
Tournaments
Signing up for a tournament, or organising one, means agreeing that your name, your face and your country are visible to registered players on PlayAwale, on that tournament's page: it is open to account holders only, and is not offered to search engines. Your Elo is never shown there: it is only used to check a minimum Elo, and to seed the players. The country a tournament requires is the one the site reads from your connection address.
What is kept: your registration and its date, the date of your fair-play promise, your points, your rank and your winnings. A game played to its end is saved with its moves, and can be replayed; an incomplete game — time out, resignation, absence — is not: only its result is kept, and it counts towards your Elo. The tournament game server, on the publisher's machine, sees the moves go by like the online game relay, keeps nothing, and only sends the course of the game to the site. Closing your account deletes your registrations; your line stays in the standings of finished tournaments, without a name, so as not to distort the others' points.
Email reminders are optional: if you tick the box when registering, the site writes to you twice, at your account’s address — 24 hours and then 2 hours before the tournament starts. For this it keeps the date of your consent, the language of the page and your device’s time zone, and nothing else. You can stop them at any time from the tournament page; they stop by themselves if you withdraw or if the tournament is cancelled.
The Cowries of a tournament: creating a tournament costs 500 Cowries, taken out of the game; the entry fee of a paid tournament forms a pot, shared among the top three, and refunded if the tournament is cancelled or if you withdraw before registration closes. Cowries are an in-game currency: they cannot be bought or sold, and are worth nothing outside PlayAwale.
In-game chat
The messages you exchange during a network game go through the game relay, like moves and moods. The relay passes them to your opponent, and to them alone: spectators of the game do not receive them. Their content is recorded nowhere, neither in a database nor in a log. The connection that carries them, however, leaves the same trace as any connection to a server: IP address, date and time in the technical logs, as stated above for network play. Those logs contain no message.
By writing to your opponent, you undertake to obey the law. Prohibited in particular are insults, threats, harassment, incitement to violence or hatred, racist, antisemitic, sexist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory remarks, glorification of terrorism, sexual content, and any invasion of another person’s privacy. You alone are responsible for what you write.
To report a problem, write to contact@nlion.fr, giving the date, the time and the game code. In the moment, leaving the game ends the exchange. The publisher can close the chat, for one game or for the whole site, and cooperates with the judicial authorities when they request it.
Audience measurement
To understand how the site is used and improve it, each page view is recorded: the page, the time, the country, the name of the site you came from, the type of device and browser, the window width and the time spent on the page. No cookie: a returning visit is recognised by an irreversible fingerprint of the IP address and browser, computed with a secret server key — the address itself is never kept. These figures are for the publisher only, are passed on to no one, and are deleted after one year.
What the publisher sees
Of the accounts opened, the publisher sees a list: the email address, the nickname, the avatar, the country, the opening date, the days you signed in, the number of games and of friends, and the list of your finished games. It serves one purpose only: checking that there is no abuse. It shows neither your settings, nor the names of your friends, nor the content of any message.
That page is protected by a password, is shown to no one else, and disappears with the account the day you close it.
What leaves the site
The “Game rules” page, in its French version, offers a video hosted by YouTube. Its thumbnail is an image from this site: nothing is loaded from YouTube until you click the video. From that click, the video comes from the youtube-nocookie.com domain: YouTube receives your IP address and may place its own cookies on your device.
Requesting access to the Android app test records the email address you give, along with the page language and the date of the request. It is used only to add you to the Google Play testers and to write to you about it: no newsletter, and it is passed on to no one else. To have it deleted, write to contact@nlion.fr.
A message sent with the contact form goes by email to the publisher, with the address you give to receive the reply, your name if you enter it and, for a bug, the name of your browser, your operating system and your type of device. It is not stored on the site: only the date it was sent and an irreversible fingerprint of the IP address are kept, for one day, to limit the number of messages.
The partner shop records nothing: it asks for no name, no address and no payment, and the email that tells me someone has left for Club Awalé carries only the product, the language of the page, the country and the time. Everything that follows happens at Club Awalé, under their own terms.
Your rights
An account is closed the same way, from “My account”. The request is confirmed by a link valid for a quarter of an hour, and then nothing remains: no address, no nickname, no avatar, no friends, no signed-in device. The player profile goes with the account.
For any question about your data, or to exercise your rights of access, rectification and erasure, write to contact@nlion.fr: you will receive an answer within one month. You may also lodge a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority (cnil.fr).
The partner shop
PlayAwale shows the Club Awalé catalogue and points to their site, where the basket, the payment and the shipping take place. The sale is a contract between the buyer and Club Awalé alone: PlayAwale is not a party to it, guarantees neither prices, nor availability, nor shipping costs and times, nor returns, warranties and after-sales service, and takes no part in any dispute about an order. The applicable terms and conditions of sale are those of Club Awalé.
This partnership is paid: orders placed with the PlayAwale discount code are credited to PlayAwale, and fund the development of the online game. Links to Club Awalé are marked as partner links.
Intellectual property
The code, texts, drawings and mascot of PlayAwale belong to their author. Awale itself belongs to no one: it is a traditional game, played for centuries.
Automated collection
The games played on PlayAwale — their moves, their analyses, the rankings — form a database protected by the rights of database producers (Articles L.341-1 et seq. of the French Intellectual Property Code). Collecting them with robots, scripts or any other automated means is prohibited without the publisher’s written consent, as is reusing them to build another database, train an artificial intelligence model or feed another service.
Nothing changes for players or for search listings: search engines, assistants and link previews that respect the robots.txt file access the site’s public pages as usual.
To enforce this rule, the site applies technical protection measures that may restrict or temporarily suspend automated access. They rely on technical connection information — an irreversible fingerprint of the IP address, never the address itself, and the browser type — kept for a few days at most.
Do you think you were blocked by mistake, or would you like to use this data for research? Write to contact@nlion.fr.
Les actualités de l'awalé
La page « Actualités de l’awalé » rassemble chaque semaine ce qui se publie sur le jeu : tournois, clubs, culture, vidéos, agenda. Elle est préparée automatiquement : un programme repère les publications, puis une intelligence artificielle en rédige un court résumé. La recherche sur le web passe par un moteur de recherche, Tavily ; les résumés sont rédigés puis relus par deux intelligences artificielles installées sur le serveur de l’éditeur, Qwen 2.5 et Gemma 2, avec Ollama. Aucun article n’est confié à un service d’intelligence artificielle en ligne.
Voir les actualités de l'awalé
Une collecte respectueuse des sites
Le programme qui prépare cette page se comporte en visiteur discret. Il ne passe qu'une à deux fois par semaine. Avant d'entrer sur un site, il lit son fichier robots.txt et s'y conforme : une page que le site réserve aux humains n'est jamais consultée. Il laisse au moins cinq secondes entre deux visites sur un même site — davantage si celui-ci le demande — et renonce aussitôt à un site qui refuse son accès.
De chaque article, la page ne reprend qu'un titre, un court résumé et un lien vers l'original, qui reste la référence. Une image n'est reproduite, en format allégé, que si le site d'origine l'autorise ; elle reste la propriété de son auteur et renvoie vers sa page. Chaque lien est vérifié à chaque mise à jour : un article dont la page ne répond plus, ou qui ne parle pas du jeu, est retiré.
Les vidéos
Les vidéos restent hébergées par leur plateforme, YouTube notamment. Tant que vous ne lancez pas une vidéo, rien n'est chargé depuis cette plateforme : la vignette affichée est une copie servie par ce site. En cliquant sur lecture, vous vous connectez au service de la plateforme, qui peut alors déposer ses propres cookies, selon sa propre politique de confidentialité.
Responsabilité
Les contenus cités restent sous la seule responsabilité de leurs auteurs et de leurs éditeurs. PlayAwale n'en contrôle ni l'exactitude, ni la disponibilité, ni l'évolution, et ne saurait en être tenu responsable. Les résumés, rédigés automatiquement avec l'aide de l'intelligence artificielle, peuvent contenir des approximations : la source fait foi.
Cette page est servie par le serveur personnel de l'éditeur, home.nlion.fr, qu'il héberge et administre lui-même, en France.
Vous êtes l'auteur d'un contenu repris et souhaitez qu'il soit retiré ou corrigé ? Écrivez à contact@nlion.fr : ce sera fait sans délai.
Les pages d’apprentissage : les coups et les ouvertures
Deux pages du site sont préparées automatiquement à partir des parties jouées sur PlayAwale :
Stratégie de l’awalé : les cinq coups qui gagnent · Ouvertures de l’awalé : quel premier coup jouer ?
D’où viennent les exemples
Les positions montrées viennent de vraies parties. Chacune est rejouée avec les règles du jeu avant d’être publiée, comme le coup qu’on revoit derrière la petite caméra : rien n’est inventé.
Comment l’étude des ouvertures est faite
Un grand nombre de parties sont relues : celles jouées contre les adversaires les plus exigeants du site, et celles jouées à deux. Chaque ouverture est comparée à la moyenne, adversaire par adversaire. Ce relevé est refait de temps en temps, sur une copie des données ; chacun reste daté sur la page.
Vos parties et vos données
Aucune donnée personnelle n’est montrée ni utilisée : ni nom, ni pseudonyme, ni pays, ni adresse. Une partie n’y compte que par ses positions et son résultat, et n’est attribuée à personne.
À prendre comme une indication
Ces chiffres décrivent les parties du site, pas une règle à suivre, et le programme qui juge les coups peut se tromper.
The AIs’ Elo rating
Every opponent in solo mode has an Elo rating, shown when you choose a level and on the “How the AIs play” page. It measures how strong the AI is against the other AIs, not against players.
How the AIs play · The AIs’ Elo rating
A tournament between the AIs
The eight AIs play one another on the publisher’s computer, never on the server, and each one plays exactly as it does on the site, with the same thinking time. So that games do not repeat, they start from real early-game positions taken from games played here; each position is played twice, with sides swapped. AIs of similar strength meet more often than the others, because that is where the gap is hardest to measure. Only the result of the tournament is published.
How the rating is calculated
The method is Arpad Elo’s, used in chess: the gap between two ratings tells what share of the points each side should score. With equal ratings, each scores half; 200 points ahead, the stronger one scores about three quarters; 400 points ahead, about nine in ten.
Ratings are not adjusted game after game, which would make the result depend on the order of the games: instead, the ratings that best explain all the results of the tournament are found in one go. A win counts as one point, a draw as half a point.
The reference point and the margin
An Elo rating only means something compared with another: the average of the eight AIs is set at 1500. So that an AI that wins every game does not get an infinite rating, each pairing also counts one imaginary draw, which weighs next to nothing against the real games.
The “±” margin shows how precise the rating is: the calculation is repeated on a large number of imaginary tournaments, drawn at random from the observed results, and the margin covers 95% of the ratings obtained. When two AIs’ margins overlap, the tournament cannot say which one is stronger.
What the rating does not tell you
The rating compares the AIs with one another. An AI can therefore turn out to be easier for players than one with a lower rating: that is what the share of games players win against it, shown alongside, tells you. No player data goes into this calculation. It is redone whenever an AI changes.
Latest tournament: September 30, 2026.
The rating of players with an account
Every player with an account also gets an Elo rating, on the same scale as the AIs. It is calculated as in chess.
The games that count: against the solo-mode AIs, whose rating is the one from the tournament, and online against a player who also has an account and already has a rating. A two-player game on the same screen does not count.
The first five games are an assessment. The first rating is the performance over those games: the opponents’ average rating, adjusted for the score, with two imaginary draws against an opponent rated 1500 so that it doesn’t run away on so few results.
After that, the rating moves after every game: beating a stronger opponent earns a lot, losing to a weaker one costs a lot. It moves quickly during the first thirty games, more slowly afterwards, and even less above 2400.
A resignation counts as a loss. A game left before its second move is cancelled: it does not count.
Online, a resignation before each player’s fifth move does not count, and at most three games a day count against the same opponent.
Credits
- IP geolocation data by DB-IP (“IP to Country Lite”), under CC BY 4.0. db-ip.com
- Portraits: the avataaars library, under the MIT licence; Avataaars artwork by Pablo Stanley.
- Flags: the circle-flags collection by HatScripts, under the MIT licence.
- Country names: the i18n-iso-countries library, under the MIT licence.
- Fonts: Joti One and Roboto, served by this site, under the SIL Open Font licence.
Applicable law
This notice falls under French law. The site is provided as is, with no guarantee of availability: it is a game, not a service.
Last updated :