Watch Picker Game - This or That

Rolex brings the Submariner and the Daytona, Omega the Speedmaster and the Seamaster. The integrated bracelet is well represented: Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711, Vacheron Overseas, and the Tissot PRX doing the same idea at a fraction of the money. Cartier has the Tank and the Santos, and the Reverso is in from JLC. Pilot and chronograph ground covers the Tag Heuer Carrera, the Breitling Navitimer, the IWC Big Pilot and the Panerai Luminor. Beyond the Rolex diver there is the Tudor Black Bay and the Seiko Prospex. Then the three that make a random draw worth watching: the Casio G-Shock, the Grand Seiko Snowflake and the Hublot Big Bang.

There are no photographs. Every card is typeset instead - the house name set large across the top, the model underneath, a short descriptor in the footer: Moonwatch, panda chrono, slide-rule bezel, frosted dial, tonneau quartz, unbreakable. You are choosing on the name and on whatever you already carry in your head about it, rather than on one press shot with the light in exactly the right place.

Twenty watches make ten rounds and the pairs are drawn from the whole pool on every page load rather than being fixed. The Submariner does not reliably meet the Seamaster. It can just as easily meet the G-Shock, and that is a far more interesting question than the obvious pairing asks. These are the draws worth waiting for:

Two cards with a VS badge between them. Click either card to take it. A or the left arrow picks the left watch, B or the right arrow picks the right one, and R picks at random if you genuinely cannot separate them. On a phone or tablet you can swipe instead of tapping.

The counter above the cards reads Round 1 of 10, or Round 1 of 5 if the ability level in the grown-up drawer is on its shortest setting, which for this deck governs run length and nothing else. At the end of a stretch the game pauses and asks whether to keep going, which on a ten-round deck usually means the run is done. A Choose for me button sits under the cards for a real coin-flip.

The finish is a podium of the three watches that won most often, and then the rest of the field listed in order with each one's wins and losses beside it. That second list is the part worth reading: a watch that lost once, to the eventual winner, sits high on it, which a straight podium would never show you.

The results address has the picks encoded into it, so the link is the result. Send it and the other person opens your podium and your full ranking on their own screen without signing in to anything. There is a share button next to it, and a session log you can print or expand to see every matchup in the order it happened.

Adding ?mode=bracket to the address changes the format entirely: sixteen of the twenty run as a straight knockout, four sit out, and a different four sit out next time you load it. A bracket takes about three minutes and ends on a single winner rather than a ranking, which is the version to use when you want one answer rather than a table.

It is not a comparison tool. There are no prices, no reference numbers, no movement or water resistance figures and no buying advice anywhere in it, and if that is what you came for you want a database rather than a game. What it does instead is push twenty watches through a series of forced two-way choices and then show you what your own answers added up to, which is harder to fake than a wishlist and quicker than a forum thread.

It is also, plainly, the odd one out on this site. Everything else here is a game for children, built by a UK tutor for one-to-one lessons, and the watch deck is the same two-card mechanic pointed at a grown-up hobby. That means the furniture is shared: the controls behind the T key hold the ability level that sets run length, plus calm mode, high contrast and a sound toggle, and the watch that wins still lands in a sticker book. None of it is aimed at you, but none of it gets in the way either.