How the Weekly Works
Wildcard Weekly started in 2025 as a photocopied zine handed around a Brisbane board-game club. The premise was narrow on purpose: review only casual games in which the joker, jester or wild card is a working part of the machine. Ninety issues later the premise has not moved an inch — only the readership has.
Every issue follows the same production week. Monday we shortlist. Tuesday we argue. Wednesday two editors independently write their verdicts and the third reconciles them. Thursday morning, Brisbane time, the issue ships to the site and the mailing list simultaneously. If a game cannot be finished honestly in a week, it waits for the next issue rather than getting a rushed number.
We accept no sponsorships, we buy or download every game ourselves, and no verdict is ever edited after print. When we get something wrong, the correction runs at the top of the next issue where everyone can see it.
The Editors
Margot Deverell
Former print sub-editor with an unhealthy archive of 1980s puzzle magazines. Margot owns the final read of every issue and the house rule that a score must survive being read aloud in a flat voice. Current obsession: Court of Cards, level 51.
Priya Narayanan
Ten years of QA testing before she defected to criticism, which explains the spreadsheets. Priya times every session, logs every hint used, and once played a runner for nine hours to confirm a single leaderboard claim. It was true.
Callum Reyes
The office contrarian and the reason our verdict meetings run long. Callum champions the strange ones — the word games, the one-hand climbers — and writes the reader-questions column. He has never once agreed with a 10/10 and hopes he never does.
Our Standards, In Writing
| Standard | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Two editors minimum | No verdict is one person's taste. Every score is a negotiated settlement between two full playthroughs. |
| Twelve hours combined | The clock is logged per title. If a game is shorter than that, we finish it twice. |
| Nothing to disclose | No review copies with conditions, no affiliate arrangements, no advertising from studios we cover. |
| Free to play, honestly | We only cover games you can play in full without spending anything. If that changes post-release, the review is annotated within a week. |
| Corrections in print | Errors are corrected at the top of the following issue, never silently. |
If you believe an issue fell short of any line in that table, write to us. The letters form lands directly with Margot, and the strongest challenge each month is published with a response.