No.04 — Face-Off
A tournament bracket, one bout at a time
Face-Off refuses to let the crew hide behind a ranked list. It seeds every item into a single-elimination bracket and forces the room to choose, one brutal pairing at a time: this or that. No "well it depends." Each bout is a straight crew vote, and the winner advances while the loser goes home. By the final, you haven’t just made a list — you’ve survived a whole tournament of small betrayals.
How it plays
- The items are seeded into a bracket. Byes are handed out if the count isn’t a clean power of two, so any pool fits.
- Two items step into the ring. Every hand votes for one. Highest vote advances; the loser is eliminated.
- A dead tie goes to a coin flip — the game refuses to fudge it, and the room has to live with fate.
- Round by round the field halves until one item takes the crown, and the bracket itself becomes the ranking.
Eight candy bars enter. Snickers vs. Twix is a 4–4 nail-biter that goes to a coin flip — Twix survives on luck alone and someone will bring it up for years. In the final, the crew realizes it has to choose between Reese’s and Kit Kat and briefly considers never speaking to each other again.
Ideal crew size
Three and up for the voting to have stakes; four to ten is ideal so ties are common enough to be dramatic. The real dial is the pool size: 8 items is a tidy round, while a full 16-item bracket is a genuine evening of arguing — plan accordingly.
Keep the bracket to 8 unless the crew is settled in for the long haul. And lean into the coin flips — a bout decided by fate produces far more outrage than one decided by a landslide, and outrage is the point.
Seed the bracket and choose No.04, or browse all eleven modes.