Cover Duel

Two capsules appear. You pick one. The next pair is already loaded, so a round costs a click or an arrow key. There is no account, no sign-up, and nothing to read first — the whole point is that you answer the way a player browsing Steam would.

Which side a game appears on is decided at random each round, and both sides are recorded, so the left-click habit can be measured rather than assumed away. The number it comes to is published on the leaderboard.

Every game in the pool has a page with its win rate, how that compares with other games in its genre, and which covers beat it. When a capsule is revised, the votes for each version are kept apart, so a redesign can be judged against the cover it replaced instead of being averaged into it.

Adding a game is free and takes a Steam link. The one condition is 20 rounds of voting, about thirty seconds: every number here is built out of rounds someone played.

A cover joins the board after 10 duels, and ranking uses the lower bound of a 95% confidence interval rather than the raw win rate — a short lucky run does not outrank a long consistent one.

Only the top 100 are published. There is no ranking of everything else and no list of the worst covers: a developer's own numbers are on their own page whatever those numbers say.

Unreleased games only. Once a game has launched, its store page carries reviews and a player count that say far more than a cover test would. Most of the pool is collected automatically from Steam's coming-soon listings; the rest is developers adding their own.

Adult-only games are left out, and a game's owner can take it out from its page in one click. Developers of games we listed ourselves can claim them with an account first.