Rules of the game
The goal
Your goal: survive longer than everyone else in your Arena. Last player standing wins the prize.
One pick per round
It's one pick per ROUND, not per MATCH — not per day, not per event. A round can hold many matches: the World Cup's first round has 24, a semi-final has 2 (4 teams in play) — you still pick just one team.
Brazil
France
Argentina
England
How it works
01
Join an Arena
Public Arenas are open to anyone. Private Arenas need an invite link from a friend.
02
Lock your pick each round
Each round, before the deadline, choose one team from that round's matches and lock it in — your life's on the line.
03
Survive and repeat
If your team wins — or advances, in a single-game knockout — you survive the round. Lose or draw and you lose a life. Run out of lives and you're out.
Lives
Every arena gives each player a set number of lives — 1 to 5. With 1 life it's classic: one wrong pick and you're out. With more, a loss or draw costs a life instead of ending your run, and you're only eliminated at zero. More lives keep the field bigger for longer — and make tiebreakers matter more. Heads up: surviving every round doesn't win the prize on its own — if more than one player reaches the end alive, whoever has more lives wins.
The rules
Pick one team per round before the deadline. What happens if you miss it is up to the arena — some eliminate you, some auto-pick a team for you. But the auto-pick only covers you once: go on auto-pick two rounds in a row and you lose a life on the second — and you're out if it was your last.
If your pick wins its match — or advances, in a single-game knockout — you survive the round and move on.
If your pick doesn't win, you lose a life — a draw counts as a loss. The exception is a single-game knockout, like the World Cup: there's always a team that advances, so penalties count and there's no draw — whoever picked the team that went through survives. In a two-leg tie, each leg is scored on its own — your team can go through on aggregate and you'd still take the hit if it lost that leg.
You can't pick the same team twice in the same tournament.
Chose Brazil in round 1? They're gone until the tournament ends. That's where your strategy comes in.
Reach a round with no legal team left to pick and you're eliminated automatically.
The last player alive wins the Arena and the prize.
Tiebreakers
Sometimes a single round wipes out everyone still alive, or the tournament ends with more than one player still standing. When more than one survives, ALIVE decides the winner in this order:
01
Lives left
More lives remaining wins. A player with a life in hand outlasts one with none.
02
Performance in the deciding round
Still tied on lives? Whoever went furthest in the round that decides the title wins. In knockouts (World Cup, Wimbledon, any elimination tournament), it's the final: a winning pick beats one that lost its match, which beats running out of teams, which beats missing the deadline.
03
The arena's rule
Still tied after that, the host's chosen tiebreaker decides: everyone co-wins, the boldest pick (worst odds) wins, or whoever still had the most teams available wins.
Example
You picked Brazil.
You picked France.
You picked Argentina. They lost.