A site for settling arguments, two at a time

Every ranking you have ever read was written by somebody. A magazine picks the hundred greatest albums, an editor argues for their favourite, and the list comes out settled before you got a vote. This one is the other way round: nobody here has an opinion except the people who play.

You are shown two things and you pick one. Your pick stays on screen and faces a fresh challenger, fifteen times over, until one is left standing. It takes about ninety seconds and there is nothing to read first — which is the point, because a game that has to be explained is a game most people close.

How the rankings are built

Not by counting wins. In a run like this the champion accumulates victories simply by staying on screen, so “most wins” would rank whoever happened to get drawn first. Instead every contender carries an Elo rating, the system chess uses: beating something rated above you moves you a lot, beating something below you barely moves you at all.

That makes the ranking a measure of who beats whom, not of who turned up most. It also means one lucky run cannot crown anything — and that a loss to a strong contender costs almost nothing.

The rules this site holds itself to

A site made of numbers is only worth visiting if the numbers are true. Three rules do most of the work, and all three cost us something:

No percentage without the votes behind it

“68% agree with you” only appears once enough people have settled that exact pair. Below that you get a different true statement instead of a rounded guess. Most duels currently fall into “below that”, and we would rather say so than invent something.

Nothing is published until it has something to say

Head-to-head pages stay out of search until the pair has real votes; an arena’s finals stay shut until it has a hundred. A site that publishes thousands of empty pages ranks for nothing and deserves to.

Everything shown is the real thing

The actual poster, the actual photograph, the actual record sleeve. No generated images of things that exist. When a picture comes from Wikimedia, the photographer and the licence are printed on it.

Where it is right now

24 arenas, 1,888 contenders, and 483 duels settled so far. The site is days old, so most of those numbers are small — you can move them considerably in ninety seconds, which is not something you can say about many places.

There are no accounts, no email, no ads. Your champions are remembered on your own device and nowhere else. What you can read about that is on the privacy page, and where the pictures and data come from is on the credits page.

Built by one person, in Romania. If something in a ranking looks wrong to you, it probably is — the fastest way to fix it is to play the arena and out-vote it.