Review Process Protocols

Board review is intended both to help designers produce better boards and to maintain a high level of quality for live boards on WarGear. However, when it comes down to it, board review is a matter of judgment. This page is meant to help all parties, both reviewers and board designers, by providing a transparent set of guidelines that seek to better define what is and is not expected of a board in order to meet WarGear standards. See more detail on the Review Process Protocols Talk Page.

The Review Board's primary function is to ensure that a minimum standard of quality is met before boards become 'live', i.e. available for public play, on WarGear. Its secondary functions are to make the experience a positive one for the designer and to provide constructive feedback on how to improve the map during the review process (though this latter purpose should be largely dealt with during development).

WarGear Standards use the IEEE style guide for standards. “Shall” is used to define a requirement that if not satisfied will prevent the board from going live. “Should” is used to suggest a best practice, but does not denote an automatic disqualification. See the Review Process Protocols Talk Page for more details.

• Boards shall have at least one dev game (ideally several to many more) played on them before being submitted for review.
• Boards shall have a completed Description section and Wiki page.
• Boards shall not contain inappropriate content.

• Boards must not have any ambiguous boundaries or continents.
  • Borders and Continents should be clear from the board image.
  • Continents should have a mini-map, or continent values on the map itself, or a simple mnemonic, or some other easy way to find or remember the members and value of all continents without having to go back to the map description or wiki page.
• Boards should be dual layer.
  • Designers are welcome to use single layer and circle mode for personal use, development, and/or proof of concept.
• Single Layer boards should not have stray pixels, “pixel noise”, around the edges of territories.
• Single Layer boards should avoid blank space and large uniform fields of color.
• Boards should have a set of custom card images.

• Game play should be balanced such that no player always has an advantage based on starting position, especially if players can choose their starting position during game creation.
• Should address possibility of a tendency toward crab games. Some quick fixes:
  • Increase Fog (maybe add some view-only borders also if medium fog seems like too much)
  • More valuable cards or an increasing card scale.
  • Make eliminations more valuable - card capture on, increase elimination bonus.
  • Increase bottlenecks
  • Create 'super continents' or collector continents for late-game objectives.

• Every board should have a wiki page created for it on the proving_grounds when its review game starts. When the game finishes that page is moved to the the_complete_board_list

• Except for 2-player or 3-player boards, review games should always include at least 3 members of the Review Board. – think this is built in, can't review a board unless you're on the review team
• No board shall pass review until the review game is complete.
• Other members of the Review Board not participating in the game should feel welcome to comment, and the members in the game should take their comments into consideration.
• Only the members of the Review Board who are playing the review game should be responsible for deciding, by consensus, whether to pass or fail the board. If consensus is not possible, other members of the Review Board should be consulted, and if necessary a vote taken. The last member of the review board standing in the review game should be responsible for passing or failing the board, as decided by the group.