Ask the awkward ones first

Yes. It is free to play.

No. It runs in your browser, on a phone or a laptop. It is coming to the App Store and Google Play, and that will be the same game rather than a separate one.

You are one footballer. That is your career, your shirt, your name on the team sheet. But you are not only a player: you can help run the club too. Pick the shape, name the side, bring people in. You just cannot be the whole team at once. More on how a career plays is on the game page.

That is the intended way to play. Start a club, send your friends the invite link, and the places are yours to fill. A club of real people beats a club with empty seats, because empty seats are filled by academy kids who never get any better.

A club can be open to anyone, application-only, invite-only or shut, and offers never expire. A new club takes a place at the bottom of its region, so nobody waits a season to begin. Anyone in the club can pay into the bank and see every line of its ledger, and owners and co-owners spend it on the club. How a club is run is on the game page.

No, and you cannot be. The schedule is strict: the whole division's round is played by the server at once and published to everybody at the same moment. Set your side before kickoff and read it back whenever you like.

Yes. Once, when the game launches properly. Moving from alpha to beta wipes nothing. At launch, players, clubs, leagues, honours and coins all start again, and everybody starts the game from scratch on the same day.

Until then everything is saved as you go. Anyone who played in the alpha or the beta keeps a legendary label on their profile afterwards. It says you were here, and it honours your support while the game was being built. It is decoration, and it does not raise a stat.

Weeks rather than months. You play everybody in your division home and away, a round comes round every couple of days, and then there is a short break before the next fixture list. Finish at the top and you go up; finish at the bottom and you go down.

Your fitness drains and your stats drift down a little, then stop. Everything else is untouched: your level, your coins, your career record, your honours and your place in the club.

Absence costs performance. It does not cost progress. There is no login streak in this game and there never will be.

Not with real money. Gear bought with coins does make you better, and coins are earned by working and playing, so that is progress you put in rather than a purchase. You can use only one of each consumable a day, so they cannot be stacked into a match, and premium currency is only ever allowed to buy conveniences that do not touch a match. It is a hard rule, not a current policy.

That the game is complete enough to play end to end, and that you will run into rough edges, awkward screens and things that change under you. It also means the reset above. Balance will change and numbers you had got used to will be different one morning; I say so in the dev log when they are. There is no launch date.

Not in the game yet, with no dates for any of it: the phone apps (it runs in the browser, on a phone or a laptop); alerts outside the game (results arrive in the game's own notifications, with no push and no email); cups, friendlies and national teams (every match today is a league match); and paying for anything. Nothing takes real money, and crowns, the premium currency, cannot be bought: they are earned from achievements.

In the game: Report a problem, under your face at the top right, or in Settings. It sends the screen you are on, the game's version, your device and your last few actions with your words, so you only have to say what went wrong. If the game will not open at all, write to contact@kingstrikers.com. In an alpha a bug report is worth more to me than a compliment.