A game gives away whitelist places on its raise to the people who are worth them: the ones who post about it, the ones who are good at it, and the ones who bring friends who play. This is how that is measured.
Where it lives
Every game's board has its own address,indie.fun/leaderboard/your-game, and it also appears on the launch page once there is a raise. A developer runs it from the Leaderboard section of their game.A raise needs people who have already heard of the game. The one thing a developer has to spend before the money opens is the whitelist: for the opening window of a raise, thirty minutes by default, only wallets on it can back, and each of them up to a stated amount. That is the head start, and it is the whole prize. So the board says: be worth a place, and the top of it takes the places.
It runs before there is a token, and that is the intended order rather than a loophole. A developer with a game and no raise can open a board today and start gathering; the raise is scheduled later and opens with the audience the board built. What waits without a raise is only the handing out of places, since a place is a row on a whitelist and there is not one yet. So the board keeps score in the meantime and settles once a raise exists to settle into.
Somebody is worth a place for three different reasons, so the board has three sections and an overview that adds them together. The overview is the ranking that hands out places; the other three are for reading.
Three sections rather than one, so a following on X is not the only thing worth having here: playing the game well, and bringing other people to it, count towards a place too.
Each section is a percentile of this board, 1 to 100, never a raw number. A game score is arbitrary. One game hands out millions a round and the next counts to nine, so adding a raw game score to a post score would be adding two things measured in different units, and whichever game shouted loudest would own the ranking. A percentile says how you did against the people you are competing with, which is the same unit everywhere. It also means a game that changes its scoring mid-campaign breaks nobody's standing, as long as the order is kept.
A raw of zero scores zero rather than a percentile. Most of any board, early on, is people who have not done anything yet, and they must not take the median place.
The weights say what the board is buying, which is mostly reach. The curve on the game score is the “top players should shine” rule written as a slope rather than as a cliff at the 90th percentile. A cliff makes the 89th percentile worth nothing and the 91st worth everything, which is a line people learn to sit exactly on top of.
Because the overview is a blend of percentiles, it is itself a score out of 100. Topping one column is not a place of its own; it is a large contribution to the one ranking that hands places out.
The developer sets what share of the field qualifies, by default the top 20% of everybody who scored, and it can be anything from 1% to 100%. It is a share rather than a number of places because nobody can know in advance whether twelve people will enter or four thousand: “top 100” of a field of forty is everybody who turned up, and of a field of ten thousand it is a lottery ticket. So the cut-off moves as people enter, and both the board and the developer's panel print where the line falls today rather than the rule behind it.
Every winner backs from the first second of the whitelist window, and rank decides the allowance rather than the moment. The window is first come, first served for the wallets on the list.
One wallet takes one place, however many accounts point at it. Somebody who qualifies without having linked a wallet keeps their place rather than being skipped. Promoting the next person would shuffle the cut-off under everybody below it each time a wallet was linked, so the board says they qualified and the whitelist waits for the wallet.
Five things, and you do not have to do all of them: the overview adds up whatever you did. Only the first is compulsory, because it is what puts you on the board at all.
Once, on the game's leaderboard page. It connects your X account, which is what lets us tell your posts from somebody else's, and puts you on the board at zero. You get an invite link at the same time.
Your post has to mention the account the campaign names, and, if the developer pinned an announcement, quote it or paste its link. Both count, and the link is not the lesser of the two: on X's own table, sharing a post's link is the single most valuable thing anybody can do to it. Replies and reposts of somebody else's post do not count; your own post does.
This is the step, not a fallback. The free X endpoints answer about one post by its id and will not list what an account has written, so nothing discovers your posts for you. We then read the post from X to check it is yours and see how it is doing. Nothing your browser says about it is scored.
Your best score counts, against everybody else playing it. Only an account can hold a place on the board, so sign in first.
Share your invite link. A friend counts once they have played the game about as well as its median player. The bar is a share of the field rather than a number somebody picked, so it means something in every game. The first person to claim an invitee keeps them, nobody is ever re-attributed, and you cannot claim your own link, somebody already claimed, or somebody already on the board.
Engagement is the whole of it, weighted the way X weights it. X publishes what each action does to a post's ranking, and this copies the ratios rather than inventing its own. A campaign is buying reach on X, so posting to score here should be the same act as posting to rank there.
A post is then worth the square root of that total, capped, so one viral post cannot win a board outright. And each account's posts are ranked against each other with the weaker ones counting for less: ten posts are worth under four of your best one. That is deliberately a slope rather than a cap like “your best three a day”, which is a number people count up to.
Nothing is paid for turning up. There is no base score for entering a post, and there is no follower minimum, account-age minimum or engagement floor, and the four go together. A gate at the door turns away the person with forty followers who tells all forty about the game, and never turned away a farm, which ages its accounts. A thousand empty accounts posting into the void collect a thousand times nothing.
A score is a live reading rather than a receipt. Posts are re-read on a cadence that slows as they age (every fifteen minutes for the first six hours, hourly to two days, then more slowly still), and every total is recomputed from scratch rather than added to. So a post that keeps travelling is worth more tomorrow, and a deleted post is worth nothing. Points that could only rise would make deleting a counted post a free move.
A post nobody can read is not the same as a post that is gone. X throttles, and a read that failed is not evidence about anybody's post: only a post confirmed missing by two independent readings scores nothing, and everything else leaves the score where it was.
There is a refresh button on the board for the case the slowing cadence gets wrong: somebody who has just watched a post take off. It re-reads your own posts and nobody else's, skips anything read in the last minute, and is rate limited.
Nobody types the dates. A board opens the moment it is created, which is the moment there is something to post about, since the campaign is what says what to post, and it closes two hours before backing opens. Both ends only ever had one right answer, and the two mistakes a date picker allows (a board that opened before there was anything to promote, a close that throws the result away) show up on the day they cost somebody their place. Reschedule the raise and the board follows it.
The two hours are the settle. Every post is read once more at the close and the qualifiers are then written down for good, because a competition that has closed has a result, and without a final reading somebody could close on Tuesday and be knocked out on Wednesday by a rival's old post picking up another fifty likes. It is also what stops somebody deleting a counted post the second the board shuts and keeping the reward.
While the board runs, the whitelist tracks it, so you can watch yourself cross the line. Once it is settled, the places stop moving whatever happens to anybody's posts afterwards.
Four things to fill in, in the Leaderboard section of your game. Everything else (what a post is worth, what a place is worth, the absence of floors) is the same on every board and is not settable, because each of those dials was a way to get a campaign wrong.
To have a Game section at all, your game has to report scores: one call, documented under Scores. A game that has never reported one has no game standing for anybody, and, because the invite bar is the median of its scorers, no invite on its board can count either.
Everything stays editable while the board runs, unlike the raise it feeds: none of it is on-chain and none of it was announced as terms. Editing never rewrites history. Posts already entered keep their entry, and only what they are worth is recomputed, which happens every few minutes anyway.