Tech Picker Game for Kids and Teens

Phones and computers first: iPhone, Android, Mac, a gaming PC, a laptop and an iPad. Then the consoles - PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and Steam Deck - with a VR headset alongside them. Audio brings AirPods, Sony's WH-1000XM5 over-ears and a smart speaker. Wearables are the Apple Watch and a Fitbit. Cameras cover a DSLR, a phone camera and a drone. Screens are a big TV and a projector. The last few are the things on the desk: a keyboard, a mouse and a robot.

Each card carries the maker in small capitals above the name and a one-line description below it, so the Steam Deck reads Valve, Steam Deck, handheld PC, and the Sony over-ears read WH-1000XM5, noise-cancelling. That second line is doing real work here, because a ten-year-old can name a PlayStation on sight and will still need the description under WH-1000XM5 to work out that it is a pair of headphones.

The picture on each card is an emoji rather than a product photograph. The iPhone, the Android, the iPad and the phone camera therefore all show the same phone glyph, and the name under it is what separates them - which is a reasonable reading task in itself when the child already knows the products by heart.

The deck file lists twelve tidy matchups - iPhone against Android, Mac against gaming PC, PlayStation against Xbox - and the game ignores them. It shuffles all twenty-four gadgets and pairs them off down the pile, so what you actually get is a fresh draw on every page load: AirPods against a projector, a Fitbit against a Steam Deck, a keyboard against a DSLR.

Two useful things follow. One shuffle is exactly twelve rounds, so a full run puts every gadget in the deck on screen once and none of them sit out. And the cross-category matchups are where the deck stops being obvious: almost anyone answers iPhone or Android without thinking, but choosing between a drone and a big TV takes a reason, and the reason is the interesting part.

Reloading reshuffles, so playing twice gives a different twelve rather than a repeat - which matters if you use one deck with the same person week after week.

Two cards, a VS badge, and a tap or a click to pick one. On a keyboard, A or the left arrow takes the left gadget, B or the right arrow takes the right one, and R picks at random. Swiping works on a tablet. A counter above the cards reads Round 1 of 12, or Round 1 of 5 at the shortest ability setting, and at the end of a stretch the game asks whether to keep going instead of stopping on its own.

The Choose for me button under the cards settles a genuine deadlock, which in this deck usually means two consoles. When the run finishes you get a podium of the three gadgets that won most often, and underneath it the rest of the field in order with each one's win and loss count next to it, so a gadget that only lost to the winner still sits near the top.

The results address encodes the picks themselves, which means the link is the result. Send it to whoever you were arguing with and they open the same podium and the same ranking on their own device. There is a share button that posts it, a printable session log listing every matchup in order, and a sticker in the sticker book for whatever came first.

The obvious use is the argument. Two people, one screen, twelve rounds, and a ranking at the end that neither of them can dispute because they both made it. It works the same way with a class on a board, and twelve rounds fits the back end of a lesson.

The less obvious use is the reason this deck sits on a site otherwise full of animals and shapes. Most of these games were made for one-to-one tutoring, and there is a particular child in that work who will talk at length about consoles and about nothing else. Starting on the subject they already want to discuss beats starting on the subject you had planned, and this is the deck that does that without pretending to be about anything else.

The ability level in the grown-up controls behind the T key changes the length of a run here rather than the wording, since the gadget names are the same at every level. Adding ?mode=bracket to the address runs sixteen of the twenty-four as a straight knockout, with eight sitting out and a different eight next time.