Editorial Standards

Three tiers of sources, and no invented authority

Games differ in how reliably their rules are documented, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. We work in three tiers. Where a governing body exists — FIDE for chess, the Chinese Weiqi Association and the Nihon Ki-in for Go — we cite the primary rulebook and its edition. Where a modern design has a publisher, such as Hive, we cite the publisher's official rules. Where a traditional game has no single authority — Fanorona, Surakarta, Oware, Hnefatafl, Banqi — we do not manufacture a "standard" ruleset. We state plainly where the regional versions disagree and which one this site implements.

That last tier is often the most worth reading: precisely because there is no standard answer, describing the disagreement is itself useful information.

Documented history versus legend

In the history sections we keep evidence tiers apart. For Go, the story that Emperor Yao invented the game to instruct his son comes from Zhang Hua's Bowuzhi, written centuries later, and cannot serve as evidence of origin; the earliest reliable written record is in the Zuo Zhuan, 548 BCE. Distinctions like this go into the text itself rather than being smoothed over for a better story.

The rules on the page are the rules the AI plays

What the article describes is what the game page actually enforces. Where we add an adjudication of our own so that a single-player game can end decisively — repetition draws, move limits without a capture — we say so in "Winning and Special Rules", and mark it as this site's convention rather than part of the traditional game.

Attribution, review, and update dates

Every game page records who wrote it, who reviewed it, and when it was last updated. Where content has not been independently reviewed, we say so rather than attach a name to it.

The update date is not the build time. It is read directly from the version history of the article's source file: if the content does not change, the date does not move.

On AI assistance

Some drafts were prepared with the help of AI tools. Everything is edited and checked by a person before it is published. The attribution and review lines name whoever is accountable for the content, and that does not change with how a draft began.