ZAPlayGuide is live: what the site covers and how it works

What is on the site

ZAPlayGuide is an independent guide to casino games and betting for players in South Africa. At launch it carries 102 game guides, including one for each of the 100 most played games in South African lobbies, and 28 operator reviews of the betting sites and casinos that carry them.

Around them: five pages on paying in rand (Ozow, Capitec Pay, cards, vouchers and EFT), guides on the law, verification, deposits and withdrawals, a page for each of the 13 studios whose games we cover, and the trust pages that say who writes this and how.

A game page tells you what the game is, what its studio publishes about it, and at which of the 28 operators we found it. Where a game is listed at a casino, the row says how we know: what we saw in a lobby that opens from outside South Africa, the operator's own pages or its app store listing.

How the scores are made 📐

Every score on the site is computed from facts we could check against an official source: the licence an operator holds and its number, the payment methods it lists, whether it has an app, its minimum deposit; for a game, the return the studio publishes and how many operators carry it.

The formula is published on How we rate, so a reader can recalculate any score. The same page explains why every published score sits between 4.0 and 5.0: the site scores the brands it chose to cover, and a brand that fails the bar gets no page rather than a low score. Read the colour of the pill first; it carries the difference.

Scores from other websites never enter the pill. Ties are broken by how many of our games we found at the operator, then by name.

What a Play button does today

At launch, every Play button opens the casino's official site. A button on a game page opens the official site of one of the casinos where we found that game, picked anew on each click. The site is funded by affiliate commission, and the affiliate disclosure says what that does and does not affect.

What the site does not claim

No score on the site rests on a deposit or a withdrawal of our own: we have made none yet, and the pages say so rather than describe a test that did not happen. Payout times are what each operator states.

A number we cannot trace to an official source is left out rather than guessed. Where a studio publishes several return settings for a game, the page says so instead of naming one figure as the game's.

The editorial policy holds the whole site to these rules, and this news section will follow them too: a post appears only with the source of each fact under it.