Editorial guidelines

Editorial guidelines

These are the rules the desk works to. They are published because a reader has no other way of telling the difference between a page that was written from documents and a page that was written from an affiliate brief.

1. A number needs a source. Every figure on a page — a wagering multiplier, a minimum deposit, a withdrawal cap, a licence number — comes from a document we can point at. If the source disappears, the figure goes with it rather than being rounded into a claim.
2. No experience the desk has not had. Nothing on a page is presented as a deposit, a spin, a withdrawal or a support chat carried out by someone here, because none of that happened. Where an operator’s behaviour can only be known by holding an account, the page says the question is open.
3. The law comes before the offer. A page about an offshore casino says it is offshore, in the first screen and not in a footnote, and says what protection that does and does not give a New Zealand player before it says anything about a bonus.
4. Commercial links are disclosed and separated. Links that pay us are marked, the footer says so on every page, and the ordering of a list is decided by the desk before any commercial consideration is applied to it.
5. Corrections are visible. We fix the page, we move its date, and where a correction changes a conclusion we say what changed. We do not quietly delete a page to make an error disappear.
6. Nothing is written for a search engine that would not be written for a reader. A page exists because a question exists. If we cannot answer the question from documents, we do not publish the page.

How a page is built, in the order it happens

A casino page starts with the licence, not with the bonus. The first question is which regulator the operator answers to and what that licence obliges it to do about segregated player funds, dispute resolution and advertising. The second question is what the terms say about the things that decide whether a win can be collected: wagering multipliers, maximum bet while a bonus is active, withdrawal caps, dormancy, and which documents verification will ask for. Only then does the page describe games, payment methods and support channels, because those are the parts a reader can check in a minute and the terms are the parts that take an hour.

Every page is read again against the same documents before its date changes. That is the whole meaning of the date beside a heading: not the day the page was created, and not a timestamp moved by a script, but the day someone read the operator’s current terms and the current New Zealand rules and confirmed that what the page says is still what the documents say. Where a re-read changes nothing, the date still moves, because “checked and unchanged” is information too.

What these rules cost, in practice

Rules like these remove pages as often as they produce them. A list of “the fastest paying casinos” is easy to write from marketing copy and impossible to write from documents, so this site describes what an operator states about withdrawal processing and says plainly that the statement is the operator’s, not a measurement. The same applies to support quality, to loyalty schemes whose terms are not published, and to any claim about what happens after verification. Where the honest answer is “the terms do not say”, that is the sentence printed on the page.

They also decide the shape of the site. There are no star ratings, no invented author portraits and no user reviews here, because a score, a face and a testimonial all imply evidence this desk does not have. What replaces them is duller and more useful: the licence, the clause, the figure, the date it was read, and the name of the thing that could not be confirmed. A reader who disagrees with a conclusion can therefore check the same documents and reach their own — which is the only form of trust worth asking for on a subject where the money is real and the age limit is 20.

What we do not do

• Nobody here holds a casino account. No money of ours goes through an operator’s cashier, nothing on this site is a report of a play session, and no number here came from one. Where a figure appears, it comes from the operator’s own published terms, from the Gambling Act 2003, or from a Department of Internal Affairs (Te Tari Taiwhenua) publication, and the page says which.
• We do not score casinos out of five. A star rating implies a measurement we have not made. Pages list what an operator offers and what its terms say, and they name the thing we could not confirm instead of rounding it into a number.
• We do not publish invented authors. There are no bylines with portraits here. Pages are produced and checked by the editorial desk, and the date beside a page is the date it was last checked, not a decoration.
• We do not take money to change a conclusion. We are paid a commission when a reader opens an account through a link on this site. That pays for the work; it does not buy a placement, a ranking or a sentence.
• We do not tell you that offshore gambling is risk-free. Until licences are issued from 1 December 2026, every online casino that accepts New Zealanders is offshore, and that is the single most important fact on this site.

Gambling harm

Gambling is not a way to make money, and the Gambling Act 2003 restricts what may be advertised to New Zealanders for good reason. Nothing here is advice to gamble. You must be 20 or over to open an account with an offshore casino, deposit limits are worth setting before you play rather than after, and if gambling has stopped being entertainment for you or for someone close to you, the Gambling Helpline is free, confidential and available 24 hours: 0800 654 655 or gamblinghelpline.co.nz.