King of the Ether Throne was one of the earliest Ethereum games to get real attention. The mechanic is the purest possible statement of pay-to-rank: there is one position, the throne. To take it you pay more than the current monarch paid — a fixed multiple above their price. The deposed monarch is compensated out of your payment, the contract keeps a cut, and the price to take the throne from you is now higher again.
Everything a modern board struggles to design was already there. Escalation is automatic. The previous holder is paid, so being outbid is not purely a loss. And the rules were not marketing copy — they were the contract, which anyone could read.
The failure it is actually famous for
The game is remembered less for its economics than for what happened when compensation payments failed. Sending funds to a contract address can require more gas than a simple transfer, and when those sends failed, the intended compensation did not arrive. What looked like a rule — the old monarch always gets paid — turned out to be a rule that held only under conditions nobody had stated.
It became a standard teaching case: prefer letting recipients withdraw funds themselves over pushing payments to them, because a push that can fail is a promise that can break. That lesson generalises well past Solidity.
What this census inherited
5 boards on file mention returning money to an outbid holder. Almost none say what happens when that return fails, who bears the fee, or whether the refund is automatic or a request. King of the Ether Throne is ten years of warning about exactly that gap, and it is the reason this site records a refund as mentioned on the page rather than as a fact about how the board behaves.
A refund promise is the most expensive thing a board can offer and the cheapest thing it can claim. In this census, the two are still indistinguishable from outside — which is precisely the sort of gap the evidence ledger exists to keep visible instead of smoothing over.