Is there a fee if I leave a game late?

It depends on whether the organizer set a cancellation policy. If they did not, leaving before the game starts is free and any online payment is returned to your Playbox wallet.

If they did, leaving inside one of their penalty windows costs a fee that is a percentage of the game price and goes to the organizer as compensation. The organizer sets up to three windows and picks the numbers themselves. A common setup is 50% under 12 hours before kickoff, 75% under 6 hours and 100% under 3 hours, so always read the terms on the game screen rather than assuming. How you pay depends on how you were paying for the game:

• You paid online or from your wallet: the fee is kept out of your refund and the rest comes back to your wallet.

• You were going to pay cash: you never paid Playbox anything, so the fee becomes an unpaid fee you owe that organizer, and your wallet is not touched.

A fee is never smaller than $1 in your currency and never larger than the price of the slot. An unpaid fee has to be settled before you can join that organizer’s games again, whatever method you would pay the game with, and it expires by itself after 60 days. Most organizers also forgive a first late cancellation with a warning, see “Is my first late cancellation free?”.

You always get a 30-minute grace period after joining, or after being added or auto-added from the waitlist, during which leaving is completely free. You can see the exact terms before you join and get a warning before you leave.

The warning also comes when you owe nothing. If you leave early on a game that has a cancellation policy, the app still tells you that cancelling close to kickoff would cost money next time, so the first fee you ever pay is not the first time you hear about the rule.