The Turn is operated by Carson Shaner, an individual based in New York, United States ("we", "us"). By playing The Turn you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, do not play.
Read these alongside the Privacy Policy.
The Turn is a free browser game. Every player in the world plays the same course each day, generated in advance, and competes on one global leaderboard. There are three daily games: The Turn (nine holes), The Pitch (nine par 3s) and Closest to the Pin (eighteen one-shot holes, scored in feet). Each has its own course, its own attempt and its own leaderboard, and everything in this section applies to each of them.
Beyond the daily games, players with a confirmed email address can form or join a Club and play matches and a weekly tournament within it. Sections 6 to 8 cover those.
The day turns over at 07:00 UTC — midnight on the US west coast, 3am on the east coast, 8am in the UK, 5pm in Sydney. It is a single fixed moment worldwide, because local midnight would produce twenty-four leaderboards that cannot be compared.
You get one ranked attempt per day. Your attempt is spent from your first shot, not when you finish, so a round that starts badly cannot be abandoned and restarted. Leaving mid-round costs you nothing else: the round is saved on your device and you can come back and finish it.
Once your attempt is spent you can replay the same layout as many times as you like in unranked practice. Practice rounds are never scored, never posted and never affect anything.
A round stays finishable for thirty minutes past the rollover it belongs to, so a round started at five to seven is not taken away at seven. Yesterday's course can be finished. It can never be started.
You must be at least 13 years old to play. By playing, you confirm that you are. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area and under 16, get a parent's permission before giving us an email address.
The Turn is free. There is nothing to buy and no money changes hands. It is not gambling and it is not a prize competition. No prize, payment or thing of value is offered for any score, any position on any leaderboard, any match, or any result in a Club or the Major. Points, positions and records in the game are bragging rights and nothing more.
The game records a hole in one when it happens, shows you a card for it, and, if your account has no email address on it, asks for one so that we can get in touch. We may, entirely at our discretion, recognise a hole in one made in a ranked round with a small token of congratulation. That is a gift, not a prize: it is not offered in exchange for anything, it is not owed, it has no cash value, it depends on the posted record of the round agreeing with the hole in one when we replay it, and we may change or stop the practice at any time without notice. A hole in one in a practice round, or in a round that was never posted, gets the card and nothing else. Nothing in this section makes The Turn a prize competition.
You do not create an account in the usual sense. The game makes an anonymous one for you, in your browser, the first time you play a ranked round.
You should understand what that means:
You are responsible for what happens through your account and for keeping access to your email secure.
Choosing a username is optional. Without one you appear as Anonymous.
Usernames are 3 to 16 characters, using letters, digits, underscores and hyphens, and must start with a letter or a digit. They are public and appear beside your score to every other player. They are the only thing you write that anyone else sees.
You must not choose a username that:
Some names are blocked or reserved, and the check that enforces this runs on our side rather than in the game. If a name is refused, choose another; we will not always explain why.
A username is a label we let you use. It is not property and you do not own it. Names are first come, first served, and holding one gives you no right to keep it.
We may reset or reclaim any username at our discretion, including one that:
If we reset your name, you keep your account, your scores and your history. You appear as Anonymous until you choose again, and you are asked to choose on your next visit.
Leaderboards show the name an account holds now, not the name it held at the time. Every past board you appear on will show your new name, or Anonymous, in place of the old one. This is the same mechanism that shows a deleted account as [deleted].
We will usually tell you why. We are not obliged to, and where a name was chosen to evade 5.1 we generally will not, because explaining the test teaches people how to pass it.
There is no appeal, no ownership claim and no compensation for a reclaimed name.
A Club has a name, chosen by the member who creates it. Club names are 3 to 24 characters, using letters, digits, spaces, underscores and hyphens, and must be unique. They are visible to every member of the Club and to anyone a member shows them to. Everything in 5.1 and 5.2 applies to a Club name exactly as it applies to a username: the same rules on what you may not choose, the same server-side check, and the same right for us to reset or reclaim a name at our discretion, with no ownership, no appeal and no compensation. If we reset a Club's name, the Club, its members and its records stay as they were.
To report a username or a Club name, email playtheturn.co@gmail.com.
A Club is a private group of two to thirty players who can see each other's daily results, play matches against each other, and play the Major together (sections 7 and 8). You can belong to up to three Clubs at a time.
Any member of a Club can challenge any other member of that Club to a head-to-head match in any of the three daily games. A match is played on a course drawn from a separate bank, one that neither player has been given before, and is scored as a ranked round.
Match results, and the head-to-head record between two players, are kept and shown to members of the Clubs they share. Section 9 applies to a match round in full.
The Major is a weekly tournament for Clubs. Each week there is one Major course, the same for every Club, released on the Wednesday for a practice round, then played as four scored rounds, one on each day from Thursday to Sunday. Each round is ranked, one attempt, spent from the first shot, and the day turns over at the same 07:00 UTC as the daily course, with the same thirty-minute grace.
The entire point of The Turn is that everyone plays the same course on the same day without knowing it in advance. The following are not allowed:
A record of every ranked round is kept, including match and Major rounds. If a score turns out to have been obtained in breach of this section — at the time, or at any point afterwards — we may remove it, correct the leaderboard, match, Major or season it appeared on, reset or reclaim the username or Club name behind it, remove the account from a Club or close the Club, and suspend or delete the account. Leaderboard positions, match results and Major standings are not final and may be recalculated.
We are not obliged to explain a decision under this section in detail, because doing so mostly teaches people how to avoid the next one.
The Turn is provided free and as is. We make no promise that:
Your first round of any day needs an internet connection, to collect that day's course. After that the round plays offline, and a practice course is always available even when nothing else is. A finished round that could not be posted at the time is posted the next time the game is opened with a connection; if that never happens, the round is not recorded.
We may change, suspend or discontinue The Turn, in whole or in part, at any time and without notice. We may change how the game plays, how scores are calculated, how leaderboards work, and how Clubs, matches and the Major are run and scored. This is a project run by one person in their own time, and it comes with no service commitment of any kind.
The Turn — its name, its design, its artwork, its code, and the courses it generates — belongs to us and is protected by copyright and other rights.
You may play the game and share your own scorecard. You may not copy, redistribute, sell, reverse-engineer, decompile, or make derivative works of the game or any part of it, and you may not extract or reuse the course data, except where the law expressly allows it regardless of this term.
Sharing your result, including the scorecard text and the hole-in-one card the game produces, is welcome and encouraged.
The Turn is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to the United States Golf Association, The R&A, the PGA of America, the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour, the LPGA, or any golf club, tournament, governing body, equipment maker, or real golf course.
Every course is produced by an algorithm. None is a reproduction of a real place, and any resemblance between a generated hole and a real one is coincidental.
The Turn does not model, teach, or represent the actual Rules of Golf, and nothing in it should be taken as a statement of them.
The game relies on outside providers for hosting, its database, its typefaces, and recovery email. Their own terms and privacy policies govern what they do, and we are not responsible for their acts or omissions. The Privacy Policy names them.
The site may link to accounts we run on other platforms. Those platforms have their own terms.
Nothing here excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.
Subject to that, and to the fullest extent the law permits:
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, in which case they do not apply to you and the rest still stands. This is a free game — do not rely on it for anything that matters.
You can stop playing at any time. You can remove everything the game has stored on your device by clearing site data in your browser, which will also permanently delete an anonymous account with no email attached to it.
To have an account with an email on it deleted from our database, email playtheturn.co@gmail.com from that address. Your username, email address and play records are removed, and you are taken out of every Club you belong to. Your past scores stay on the leaderboards they are already on, and your past match and Major results stay in the Clubs they were played in, shown as [deleted], so that historical results and other players' records stay correct. If you own a Club, hand it to another member first (Manage members, Make owner) or ask us to close it; an account that still owns a Club cannot be deleted until one or the other has happened. This cannot be undone.
We may suspend or remove your access, your username, your scores, your place in a Club, or a Club itself if you breach these terms or if we reasonably believe you have.
We may update these terms. Where a change matters we will update the date above and say so on the site. Continuing to play after that means you accept the updated terms.
These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of The Turn, are governed by the laws of the State of New York, United States, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The state and federal courts located in the State of New York will have exclusive jurisdiction.
If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live, or of the right to bring proceedings there where the law gives you that right.
If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Not enforcing a term is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours if The Turn changes hands, and will say so on the site if that happens. These terms are the whole agreement between us about The Turn.
playtheturn.co@gmail.com