A Letterboxd for games? It depends on what you want to write down

What Letterboxd actually does

Letterboxd is a film diary. You log what you watch, with a date; you give it half a star or five; you write a review if you feel like it; you make lists, and you follow people whose lists you care about. What made it big was not any one of those pieces but that all of them revolve around keeping a record: the diary is the centre and everything else hangs off it.

When someone asks for "a Letterboxd for games", they almost always mean one of these two things:

1. A record. What I've played, what I'm playing, what's waiting, when I finished it, what I thought. That is the literal reading, and it is what the trackers solve: Backloggd, Infinite Backlog, GG, Grouvee and friends. If that is you, we compare them here, including where they beat us.
2. An order. Not "what have I played" but "which are my best games, and in what order". It is what people do on Letterboxd with the favourites on their profile and with hand-sorted lists, and in film it is what a different app, Flickchart, solves with a different method: put two films side by side and pick.

Rank Your Games is the second thing. It is not a diary and does not pretend to be one.

What Rank Your Games is

An iPhone app that builds your personal video game ranking out of duels: it shows you two games, you pick the one that stays, and the list reorders itself. There are no stars and no scores to decide on. Each duel moves both games using the same Elo system chess uses, and after a few of them your top 100 is there without you ever having written it down.

What it has:

• A first run that starts from a grid of games you probably know: tap the ones you have played and a minute later you have your first ranking.
• A top 100 that marks what climbed and what slipped since you last looked, and a poster of your top 10 to share.
• Re-ranking any game with five well-chosen duels, a waiting list for what you want to place later, platform filtering, and Discover, which reads your ranking to suggest what to play next.
• 200,000+ games from IGDB, and an optional account: you can use it without signing up.

What it does not have, plainly: a dated diary, hours played, "playing" or "abandoned" statuses, reviews, or friends to follow. If that is what you miss from Letterboxd, a tracker will serve you better.

Why duels and not stars

Because stars don't sort. If you have thirty games at four and a half stars, your "ranking" is a thirty-way tie, and the only way to break it is to drag by hand, which is exactly the chore nobody finishes. A duel is a question with an answer: of these two, which? The answer is instant, it is honest (you are not calibrating a scale, you are choosing) and it adds real information about the order. How Elo turns those answers into a list, and why we do not fiddle with its numbers by feel, is a story of its own.

How to tell which one you want

If what you want is…	Look for
Logging what you play, with dates and statuses	A tracker: Backloggd, Infinite Backlog, GG
Reviews and people to follow	Backloggd, the most social of them
Knowing how long each game still needs	HowLongToBeat
Your best games, in order, without scoring anything	Rank Your Games
Both	A tracker for the diary and this one for the order; they don't overlap