Policy
Editorial policy
What we will and will not do, and what happens when we get something wrong.
By Scooter M. · Published · Last updated
Independence
- We do not accept payment for placement. No publisher, retailer or brand can buy a position in a ranking, an inclusion in a roundup, or a mention anywhere on this site.
- We do not accept free products. There is no review copy program here, which is straightforward because we do not review games by playing them.
- Rankings are not sold, and commission does not order them. Where a cheaper game is the better gift, the cheaper game wins - which is why the highest-scoring gift on this site is also one of the least expensive.
- No sponsored content. Nothing on this site is written on behalf of anybody. Every page is editorial.
Sourcing
Every player count, playing time and age band on this site is the publisher’s own stated figure, read from the publisher’s own page and attributed to them on the page it appears on. Nothing is written from memory and nothing is taken from a retailer listing or an aggregator.
Where a publisher does not state a figure, we leave a gap. Stonemaier does not publish an age band for Wingspan, so no age for Wingspan appears anywhere on this site. “Not published” is an acceptable outcome here. A plausible guess is not.
Prices come from a live retail feed refreshed daily and carry the date they were checked. If our data is more than 48 hours old the number disappears automatically and the button reads “Check price”. We never carry a price forward and we never print one from memory. Publisher list prices, where they appear, are labeled as such with the date they were read.
What we never publish
- Invented prices, ratings, review counts or awards
- Any claim to have played, tested or owned a game we have not
- Testimonials or reader reviews we did not receive
- Credentials, tenure or expertise nobody here has
- Star ratings or aggregate ratings in structured data - we publish no ratings of our own, so there is nothing to mark up
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know. Email info@meepleandmat.com with the page and the figure.
- We respond within seven days.
- Confirmed factual errors are corrected within 48 hours of verification.
- A correction that changes a fact is noted visibly on the page with the date, rather than edited away silently.
- A change of opinion - a pick moving up or down - is not a correction and is reflected in the page’s updated date.
Update cadence
| What | How often | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Prices | Daily, automatically | Automatic. Never hand-edited. |
| Availability of featured games | Monthly | Out-of-print or unavailable picks are replaced. |
| Seasonal pages | Annually, each August | Refreshed and re-dated before the gift season starts. |
| Roundups | Every six months | Picks change when the market does, not on a schedule for its own sake. |
| Guides | Every twelve months, or on change | Price bands and publisher figures re-checked. |
| Trust pages | Every twelve months | Or immediately on any change of policy. |
Dates on this site
Every page shows a published date and a last-updated date, and both are real. The updated date changes when the content changes - not when the site is rebuilt. Our daily price refresh redeploys the whole site, and if we let that touch the dates, every page would claim to change every day and the dates would become worthless.
The same rule governs the XML sitemap: modification dates there come from real content dates and never from the build timestamp.
Affiliate links and editorial judgment
This site earns affiliate commission, set out in full at affiliate disclosure. Two things keep that separate from editorial judgment.
First, the commission rate is not an input to any ranking - it is not recorded anywhere in the data the site is built from. Second, a disclosure appears above the first buy link on every commercial page rather than only in the footer, so you know what you are clicking before you click it.
Who is responsible
Scooter M. writes this site and Slate Mill Group publishes it. Editorial responsibility for everything on it sits with the publisher.