How to Rank Your Games (Without Losing Your Mind)

You have a problem. It's not a serious problem, not in the grand scheme of things, but it's been nagging at you for a while now, probably since that conversation where someone asked you "what's your top 5 games of all time?" and you stood there, mouth half-open, realizing you genuinely had no idea how to answer.

You've played hundreds of games. Maybe thousands. You know what you love. You can talk for forty-five minutes about why Outer Wilds is a masterpiece and why everyone should play it blind. But rank your games? In order? All of them? That's a completely different beast, and if you've ever tried, you know exactly how quickly it spirals into chaos.

So let's talk about it. How do you actually rank your games without losing your mind in the process?

Method 1: The spreadsheet approach

The most obvious method. Open a spreadsheet, list every game you've played, and start sorting. Simple, right?

It works for maybe the first twenty entries. You know your top 5, you know your bottom 10, and the middle... the middle is where sanity goes to die. Is Persona 5 above or below Disco Elysium? That depends on what day you ask, what mood you're in, and whether you've recently replayed either one.

The spreadsheet approach fails because it asks you to make absolute judgments. "Where does this game sit on a scale of 1 to 500?" Your brain doesn't work that way. Nobody's brain works that way. You end up spending three hours rearranging the same fifteen games in the 30-to-45 range and accomplishing exactly nothing.

Verdict: Works for small collections. Falls apart past ~30 games.

Method 2: Tier lists

The internet's favorite. Drag your games into S, A, B, C, D tiers and call it a day. We've already written extensively about why tier lists are broken, but the short version: categories destroy nuance, your S tier is always too big, and you still can't answer "what's your #1?" because there are twelve games crammed into the same bucket.

That said, tier lists have one massive advantage: they're fun. There's something deeply satisfying about the drag-and-drop ritual, the heated debates about placements, the shared format that everyone understands. As a conversation starter, tier lists are unbeatable. As a ranking tool? Not so much.

Verdict: Great for content and debates. Bad for actually knowing your ranking.

Method 3: Scoring (the "7/10 problem")

Give every game a score out of 10. Clean, numeric, sortable. What could go wrong?

Everything, as it turns out. The gaming industry has been using scores for decades, and the result is a system where everything sits between 7 and 9. A 6/10 feels like an insult. A 5/10, which should mean "average," reads as "terrible." And when 80% of your games land between 7 and 8.5, your "ranking" is basically noise.

This is called range compression, and it happens to everyone. You don't want to give your beloved childhood game a 7, even if objectively it probably deserves one. So you bump it to 8. Then everything else needs to shift. Before long, your scale has three meaningful values: 8 (good), 9 (great), and 10 (masterpiece or nostalgia, no way to tell which).

Verdict: Looks precise. Is actually just vibes with decimal points.

Method 4: Head-to-head comparison

Here's where things get interesting.

Instead of asking "how good is this game on a scale of 1 to 10?", ask: "this game or that game, which one is better?" Just two games. One choice. That's it.

This is called pairwise comparison, and it's not a new idea. It's how chess rankings work (the Elo system), how search engines sort results, and how academic researchers compare preferences when precision matters. The key insight: your brain is terrible at absolute judgment ("rate this game from 1 to 10") but excellent at relative judgment ("this or that?").

When you compare two games directly, something interesting happens. You don't agonize. You don't deliberate for twenty minutes. You just... know. Maybe not always, maybe some matchups are genuinely painful, but most of the time, your gut makes the call in seconds. And that gut reaction? It's more honest than any score you'd carefully deliberate over.

The math behind it is elegant: each comparison is a data point, and over hundreds of comparisons, an Elo-like algorithm assembles those data points into a full ranking. You never have to think about position #47 vs position #48. You just pick between two games, over and over, and the ranking builds itself.

Verdict: Surprisingly effective. Your brain was designed for this.

But which one do you pick by?

Here's the thing though: "which game is better?" is a terrible question. Better how? Better because it's more fun moment-to-moment? Better because it told a story that stuck with you for years? Better because you'd bring it to a desert island and never get bored?

A game like Stardew Valley might crush Dark Souls in pure fun, but Dark Souls might win on atmosphere, challenge, and that indescribable feeling of conquering something that felt impossible. Asking "which is better?" forces you to average all of that into one answer, and the average is a lie.

The real power of head-to-head comparison unlocks when you stop asking one question and start asking many. Compare games by fun. Then by story. Then by soundtrack. Then by that gut-level "desert island" test. Each angle reveals a different facet of your taste, and suddenly your ranking isn't a flat list — it's a multidimensional portrait of why you love what you love.

Making it practical

So head-to-head comparison works in theory. But doing it manually? Tracking hundreds of matchups in a notebook? That's a different kind of losing your mind.

This is exactly why we built Tchoozit. The idea is simple: you build a pool of games you've played (from a catalog of over 13,000 titles), and the system serves you duels. Two games, one emotional criterion, one choice. No scores, no tiers, no spreadsheets. Just you, two games, and an honest gut reaction.

Over time, your ranking emerges across all eleven criteria. You might discover that your #1 game for pure fun is completely different from your #1 for emotional impact. That your "favorite game" is actually three different games depending on which angle you look at it from. That's the kind of self-knowledge that no tier list or 10-point scale can give you.

And because every duel also feeds into the community ranking, you get to see how your taste compares to thousands of other players. Same method, same criteria, completely different results. It's fascinating.

The honest truth

There is no perfect way to rank your games. Every method has trade-offs:

• Spreadsheets give you full control but demand superhuman consistency
• Tier lists are fun but imprecise
• Scores feel objective but collapse under their own weight
• Head-to-head duels are natural and accurate but require volume

The difference is that some methods fight your brain, and others work with it. If you've ever spent an hour rearranging a tier list and ended up more confused than when you started, you already know which category that falls into.

The simplest ranking decision you can make is: this or that. Everything else is just math.

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Ready to find out what your actual ranking looks like? Start your first duels on Tchoozit — it takes two minutes, and your gut already knows the answers.