About
Sources and how we verify
Data last checked: · how we verify numbers
Every page on this site tags its numbers, dates its checks and boxes what it could not verify. This page is the machinery under that promise: the six tiers of evidence we rank sources by, what happens to every claim before publication, how corrections get handled, and where our receipts actually live. If the editorial standards are the rules, this is the why — and the where.
The source hierarchy
We do not treat all sources as equal, and the ranking is strict enough that two tiers can contradict each other: the higher tier always wins.
| Tier | Source | What we take from it | Standing caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Official Kickstarter: campaign page, 19 updates, 28-answer FAQ and the embedded project JSON | Dates, totals, tier contents, shipping terms, the absence of stretch goals | Backers-only posts are invisible to us; page tabs vs JSON differ trivially (600 shown, 601 counted [official, project JSON]) |
| 2 | Official MinaLima rulebook PDF — 17 pages, June 2026, self-hosted by MinaLima | Rules, components, win conditions — anything gameplay | Its promised rules hub was still a 404 on 2026-10-13, so no official errata exist to hedge with |
| 3 | Hive pledge-manager pages (the official partner) | Late-pledge tier listings, shipping waves, support routes | Its totals froze mid-campaign — 1,145,517 GBP / 9,436 backers on 2026-10-12 — so we never quote Hive for money |
| 4 | Published external reviews | Play experience, verdicts, named criticisms | Sample disclosure noted per source: One Board Family used a publisher-provided copy; Bower’s reviewed mid-campaign before final components; Boardgames With Joe is featured on the campaign page itself, which limits independence |
| 5 | Community data | BGG ratings census, forum sentiment, recurring complaints | The ratings are a war, not a poll — see below |
| 6 | Press rewrites | Chronology leads, publicity milestones — always traced back to a higher tier before use | Lowest trust of all; the same 41 reports contain a traced “RPG” mislabel chain, stale drafts republished in the release month and anonymous quotes lifted from the campaign page |
Warning
BGG’s 5.066 average is a rating war, not a quality reading: of 138 ratings [BGG user data, checked 2026-10-12], 67 ones come from a J.K. Rowling boycott thread and 56 tens include self-declared counter-ratings by project participants — 89% of the votes sit at the two poles. We use BGG for what people argue about, never for what the game is worth; that reading is spelled out on the BGG score page.
What we do with every claim
Four habits, applied identically on every page:
- Provenance tags on numbers. [official] for Kickstarter or MinaLima statements, qualified with the update number or data field where it helps ([official, Update #13], [official, project JSON]); [second-hand] for press or video claims; [our analysis] / [our estimate] for anything we computed or concluded; [official comment] for staff replies in the campaign comments. A number without a tag should not exist on this site.
- Dated “last checked”. Every page shows its check date, bumped whenever we re-verify; prices and backer counts decay, so the date is part of the fact.
- Unverified boxes near conclusions. Anything we could not settle is listed at the top of a page’s end matter — and where a single unknown could flip a conclusion, it sits next to the conclusion, not buried below it.
- No verbatim official copies. Rules, tier texts and FAQ answers are restated in our own words and linked to the official origin; the official text stays at the official address. Short attributed quotes (a staff comment, a founder line) are the exception, kept brief and credited.
- Scope discipline. We have received no sample and have not played the game; where that matters — reviews and buying pages — the scope note opens the page, and external reviewers’ sample situations are disclosed with them.
The correction policy
Spotted a wrong number, a misleading line or a stale claim? Email contact@hogwartsdefenders.com (the route is on the contact page). The rules we hold ourselves to:
- Corrections that cite a source get priority; we verify against the cited origin, not against our memory.
- Once confirmed, the fix is published on the page with an acknowledgment — what was wrong, what it now says, and who flagged it.
- The corrected page’s checked date is bumped, so the change is visible in the page’s own timestamps.
- We do not quietly edit: if a correction changes a conclusion, the conclusion says so.
One correction is already on the record: our own coverage audit first missed the campaign’s official YouTube trailer and tutorial videos (the campaign page embeds neither); the media index and its underlying audit now carry the fix.
The receipts index
Everything on the site can be traced to a capture on our side — files we keep in the working material library (paths shown for transparency; they are working documents, not published pages):
| Folder | What it holds | Feeds |
|---|---|---|
| research/ | The original search-intent, competitor and SEO-landscape briefs | Topic selection only — treated as leads, never as sources, and overridden wherever official data disagrees |
| material/rules/ | The official rulebook PDF capture, page renders, OCR and our detailed rules digest built from them | All /rules/ pages |
| material/pricing/ incl. evidence/ | Price tables, the landed-cost decision guide, and raw evidence (shipping charts, comment captures with dates) | /buy/ pages and the price tables |
| material/kickstarter/ incl. raw JSON | Campaign page captures, the embedded project JSON, signed API pulls, the 28 FAQ extracts, the updates feed, and OCR of the page’s 50 story images | /kickstarter/ pages and the timeline |
| material/reviews/ | The external-review roundup: One Board Family, Bower’s Game Corner, BGG forum threads and rating census | /review/ pages |
| material/media/ | The 41-report media audit — every report’s outlet, date, URL and verdict | The media index and the mislabel page |
| material/reference/ | Data corrections vs research, board-map notes, asset and legal notes | Site-wide fact calibration, including this page |
The campaign figures that anchor every page come from Kickstarter’s own embedded project data [official]: launched_at 1782833575 (30 June 2026, 15:32 UTC), updates_count 19, faqs_count 28, comments 601, pledged £1,313,755, backers 10,959. Those six values are read machine-side from what Kickstarter serves for the project, then restated everywhere else on the site — the same dollars-and-cents policy in miniature: go to the origin, tag it, date it, and keep the rewrite at the bottom of the trust ladder.
Sources
- Kickstarter campaign page and embedded project data (launched_at 1782833575; updates_count 19; comments 601; pledged £1,313,755; backers 10,959): kickstarter.com/projects/minalima/defenders-of-hogwarts, with the official FAQ and updates
- Official rulebook PDF, 17 pages (MinaLima self-hosted): media.minalima.com/2026/06/Defenders_of_Hogwarts_-A_board_game_by_MinaLima-_Rulebook.pdf
- Hive pledge manager and late-pledge pages: hiveinteractive.net/pledgemanager and the project’s Hive page
- BoardGameGeek entry 471198 — ratings census and forum threads [BGG user data, checked 2026-10-12]
- The working receipts listed in §4 above; the correction audit lives in material/reference/, the media audit in material/media/.