> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://nimbo-9ed30387.mintlify.site/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# What Nimbo Play is

> A skill-based, player-versus-player arcade arena where the stakes are held in a Solana escrow. Currently running on devnet.

<Warning>
  **Nimbo Play runs on Solana devnet.** Devnet SOL is a free test token with no
  monetary value. Nothing you win here can be sold or exchanged, and nothing you
  lose costs you money. Treat every number on this site as a test number.
</Warning>

## The short version

**Nimbo Arena** is a real-time arcade game in the spirit of slither.io. You stake
SOL to enter, your snake spawns with a size proportional to what you staked, and
you grow by eating — pellets, boost trails, and the corpses of players who died.

The catch is the exit. Growing is not winning. The only way to turn what you are
carrying back into SOL is to reach an **extraction point** and hold it for 12
seconds, fully visible and fully vulnerable. Die before that, and everything you
carried drops to the floor for someone else.

Nimbo Play is the umbrella; **Nimbo Arena** is the first game on it.

## What this is not

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Not a casino" icon="user-group">
    You never play against the house. Every lamport you can win came from another
    player's stake. There is no random draw, no dealer, and no house edge on the
    outcome — only a flat fee on entry.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Not pay-to-win" icon="palette">
    Cosmetic skins are planned. They will stay cosmetic. Staking more makes you
    bigger, which is as much a liability as an advantage — a large snake is
    slower to turn and worth more to whoever kills it.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Not an investment" icon="triangle-exclamation">
    There is no yield, no return, and no promise of profit. The arena is
    zero-sum before the entry fee, and negative-sum after it. Most players
    should expect to lose their stake.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Not fully on-chain" icon="server">
    The gameplay runs on our servers, not on Solana. This is a deliberate
    trade-off and it has consequences you should understand before staking —
    see [Trust model](/trust-model).
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## Where the money actually lives

Your stake is not held by us in a company wallet. It goes into a **Vault**, a
program-derived account on Solana that has no private key. Nobody — including us
— can move funds out of it except through the arena program's own rules.

What the program will not let us do, even if our servers were fully compromised:

* pay out more than the vault actually holds;
* pay the same extraction twice;
* close a round early to freeze extractions that are still pending.

What it does let us do is decide *how much* you extracted, because the game
itself is off-chain. That is the honest limit of the design, and
[Trust model](/trust-model) explains it in full rather than burying it.

## Start here

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Play your first round" icon="play" href="/quickstart">
    Wallet, devnet SOL, the free demo, then your first staked run.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Game rules" icon="book-open" href="/game-rules">
    Stakes, growth, death, extraction, disconnects, rounds.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Trust model" icon="scale-balanced" href="/trust-model">
    What the chain guarantees, and what it does not.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Security" icon="shield" href="/security">
    Current posture and what happens before mainnet.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>


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