Tokens

Every lobby estimates how long its game will run from its own settings — the number of players, the timers, the number of rounds — and turns that estimate into a price:

cost = estimated minutes ÷ 15, rounded up, never below 1 and never above 20.

Rounding is up, because a game that spills sixty seconds past the quarter-hour has still used that quarter-hour. The ceiling of 20 is a promise: however long a lobby estimates, it can never ask for more than 20 tokens.

A game that overruns its estimate costs nothing extra. The estimate sets a price, not a meter.

Take a Shelter room: 24 players, 3 shelter seats. Those settings estimate about 362 minutes of play, which is 25 tokens raw — so the cap brings it down to 20. Every seat pays 20 at the start, the host included.

The game actually runs three hours. What each player pays depends on how long they sat in the room:

• A survivor who played all 180 minutes burns 13 tokens and gets 7 back.
• A player who left at minute 40 burns 3 and gets 17 back.
• A player exiled at minute 40 who stayed to watch until the end gets 7 back, exactly like the survivors — the seat was occupied either way.

One token burns the moment the game starts — that is the entry fee, and it is gone whether you played one minute or fourteen. After that, one more token burns for every 15 minutes you stay in the room.

Your clock is personal. It starts when the game starts and stops when you leave the room or when the game ends — not when you are eliminated. Watching from the sidelines still holds the seat, so it still costs.

Everything you did not burn comes back the moment your seat closes. A one-token game refunds nothing: the entry fee is the whole price.

A 20-token game, by how long you stayed:

Guests and free accounts get 20 tokens a day. PLUS gets 40 — twice as much, and without watching anything for it. They refill at midnight UTC and they do not stack: an unspent token today is not an extra token tomorrow.

Guests are counted per device. Signing in moves the allowance to your account, so it follows you between browsers and phones.

A 30-second ad is worth +2 tokens, up to 10 times a day. That puts the most a free account can hold in a single day at 40.

You can start an ad from any lobby where you are short, or from your profile.

Subscribers do not spend tokens at all. Their balance shows ∞, no game is ever priced against them, and they can never hold up a lobby.

Your seat is open until you leave it or the game ends, and it keeps burning while it is open. Because of that, a bar appears at the top of every Chillgame page while you have a game running, wherever on the site you are.

It offers two things: go back to the room, or close the seat and take the unused tokens back straight away.