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Jurisdiction · DK
Demo play, no-deposit offers and free tournaments in Denmark
Four questions and the rule behind each one. This page names no operator and carries no commercial link, because a page about the law of a market should not also be an advertisement inside it.
| Question | Answer | What the rule says | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public demo without an account | A game with no stake and no prize does not meet the definition of gambling. | Primary source | |
| Age verified before the demo | No duty established before a trial game; one may yet sit in an implementing instrument. | Not verified | |
| No-deposit offers | Allowed, under dense rules: at least sixty days to meet the conditions, and the same conditions for everyone. | Trade source | |
| Free tournaments | Not verified. | Not verified |
- Authority
- Spillemyndigheden
- Official register
- spillemyndigheden.dk/spiludbydere-med-tilladelse
- Minimum age
- 18
- Self-exclusion and help
- ROFUS (self-exclusion); StopSpillet 70 22 28 25
A permission that nobody ever granted
The first box above says that a public trial is allowed in Denmark, and that word is doing far less work than it appears to do. Nothing in Danish law permits a "demo" or a "free play" mode (the terms are the trade's, and not the statute's): what has happened instead is that the licensing requirement never reaches either of them, which is a different proposition altogether and leads a reader somewhere else.
The gambling authority sets out the test in three parts (on its own page about online casino, which we read on 20 October 2026), and all three have to be present together before a licence is needed at all. Participants pay a "stake" (money or something similar), participants have a chance of winning a prize through that payment (prizes of every kind count, and not only cash), and the game contains an element of chance.
A game with no stake and no prize fails the test twice. It is therefore not "gambling" for the purposes of the Danish act, which means that nobody needs a licence in order to offer it; no condition attached to a licence can govern it either, because there is no licence anywhere in the picture.
That is the whole of the Danish answer on "free play", and we would rather set it out in this bare form than dress it up as a policy; a regulator who has decided something looks quite unlike a regulator who was never asked the question, and the two of them produce identical boxes in a table while meaning opposite things.
What the three conditions do at the edges
The test has consequences you will not expect, and they are worth two minutes, because they explain why the Danish approach travels so badly into other markets (the authority lists the three conditions in the order given above). A game with a "stake" but no winnings falls outside the licensing requirement as well, and so does a game with winnings but no stake at all.
The second of those is the interesting one for anybody who runs a "freeroll" or hands out a "free chip" (the two shapes a free tournament takes in this trade), because in our reading an entry that costs nothing and pays a real prize satisfies two of the three conditions while missing the one about payment. On the face of the test it needs no licence.
We put that forward as a reading of the authority's own wording and not as advice, and the box on tournaments above stays at "not verified" for precisely that reason. The distance between a plausible construction of a three-part test and a published answer from the regulator who administers it is wider than it looks from outside, and we have no interest in closing it with an inference (an inference is not a source).
What the Danish structure does guarantee is that a "practice play" mode cannot be regulated into the shape that Germany gave it. There is no hook on which to hang a rule: no licence condition, no account requirement, no obligation of mathematical identity with the paid game, and consequently no Danish equivalent of the German demand that a free spin and a paid spin behave alike (§ 6j of the German treaty, for the comparison).
Outside the statute is not the same as supervised
A trial that needs no Danish licence also enjoys none of the protections a licence carries, which means no approved game testing, no account checks and no complaints route through the gambling authority. The absence of a prohibition is not a seal of approval, and in our view it should never be read as one.
The bonus rules, which are the dense part of this regime
Where Denmark becomes detailed is on offers, and the contrast with its silence about demos is almost comic. Every condition attached to a "bonus" has to be communicated in a clear and unambiguous manner beside the offer itself (a link one click away is accepted, which is the only concession the rules make), and that is a drafting requirement rather than a disclaimer.
A player must be given at least sixty days to satisfy the conditions, the same promotion has to be available on identical terms to every player inside an interval covering at least one hundred players, and an operator may not offer one player an incentive on terms that differ from those the rest are given (the two numbers are the ones to carry away).
There are further limits on the deposits and the stakes a promotion may require, on how many promotions may run at once, and on "re-wagering", with the rule that winnings produced by a promotion cannot themselves be made subject to a further "wagering" requirement (the limits are set by executive order). The "no deposit" box above sits on that body of rules and on nothing at all about "free play".
We tag it as trade-level evidence instead of primary, and the distinction is not pedantry; these requirements were read in a professional guide to Danish gambling law and not in the executive order that contains them, for a reason set out at the foot of this page.
Advertising, and the unusually comfortable position of an affiliate
Danish advertising law asks for things that read like a style guide, and an affiliate writing for this market will recognise most of them at once. Winning probabilities have to be presented correctly and in a balanced way, gambling has to be presented as entertainment rather than as an income, and nothing at all may be directed at a person under eighteen (eighteen, with no exception for a free game).
Every advertisement carries a short standing apparatus with it: the age limit, the authority's helpline, the national self-exclusion register and the "labelling scheme" that marks out a licensed operator. The four items travel together, and the requirements are specific enough that compliance becomes a matter of templates rather than of judgement.
Affiliates are expressly admitted here, and they are subject to the marketing and consumer-protection rules like anybody else who writes for money. That single sentence puts Denmark at the opposite end of our record from Italy, where an affiliate may not promote an offer or use a tracked link towards a licensed operator at all!
The practical reading is therefore simple (simpler than any other page in this set). The Danish rules constrain how an offer is described and how long a player is given to use it, and they do so in detail. On the opening of a game for nothing, we find them silent.
The limits of this reading, and the retrieval failure behind them
Two rows above are marked "not verified", and in Denmark the cause is a failure of retrieval rather than a silence in the law. We did not obtain the executive order on online casino (number 1274, dated 29 November 2019), nor any guidance from the authority dealing specifically with trial play.
The reason is mechanical, and it is worth recording for anybody who tries the same thing from another desk. The authority's own site search runs entirely in the browser and returns nothing at all over a plain request, while a generalist search for the Danish word for a demonstration game, which is "demospil", produced page after page of search-engine spam.
So the position on age checks is not established; it is merely not contradicted, and an obligation of that kind could perfectly well sit inside an executive order that we never managed to open. If you need certainty on the point, ask the authority directly rather than rely on a page such as this one!
The reliable ground here is the list of operators holding a Danish licence and the national self-exclusion register, both published by the authority and both plain enough to read without a lawyer (the helpline number sits beside them on the same site). Your own check in Denmark should start from the three conditions, because every other answer on this page follows from them.
Does Danish law permit a trial version?
It never reaches one. A licence is needed only where all three of a payment, a prize won through that payment and an element of luck are present at once, and a game with none of them stays outside the act.
Does that make a free game a supervised product?
No, and the difference matters. A trial outside the licensing requirement also sits outside approved game testing, account checks and the complaints route the gambling authority provides.
What does Denmark require of an offer?
Conditions stated clearly beside the offer, at least sixty days for a player to satisfy them, identical terms for every player in an interval covering at least a hundred players, and no further wagering of winnings produced by the promotion.
Why is the question about age unanswered for Denmark?
Because the executive order on online casino could not be obtained: the authority's own site search runs in the browser and returns nothing to a plain request.