How this list works

One line game reviews is one ordered list of 12 games. It is read top to bottom: the first entry is the best game on the list, the last entry is the worst.

No scores

Nothing here carries a number, a star or a percentage. A score pretends that a game can be measured on its own; a ranking only claims that one game is better than the one below it. The rank you see next to each game is its position in the list, not a grade.

One sentence per game

Every game gets exactly one sentence, at most 140 characters. The limit is checked when the list is built, so a second sentence or an overlong line fails the build rather than quietly landing on the page.

How a new game gets its place

Without scores there is nothing to sort by, so a new game is placed by comparison: it is held up against the game in the middle of the list, then against the middle of whichever half it fell into, and so on. A list of a thousand games needs ten of those comparisons to place the next one.

Changing your mind

Moving a game is the only kind of re-rating there is. When a game moves, everything between its old and new position shifts by one — that is the point of a relative list.

Placeholders

Entries marked Placeholder are seeded examples. Their lines and their order are both stand-ins, and they say nothing about how the games compare.

The data

The list is a single ordered file in the repository, and the site is generated from it. The same list is published as JSON and as an Atom feed of the most recently added games.