How a corner is decided

No scores. Comparing a farm to a world war with numbers would be theatre. Instead each genre gets a shortlist and we play the shortlist until one of them is clearly the one worth your evening.

Shortlist, then play

For each corner we take the three or four plausible candidates and play them in parallel for a fortnight. The winner takes the slot and the runners-up get a line in our notes in case the situation changes.

All of it on free accounts, because that is how most readers will arrive.

What decides it

Four things: how quickly a newcomer gets to the interesting part, how honest the shop is, how well the game respects a short evening, and whether we kept opening it voluntarily after the test period ended.

• It runs in a browser tab with no installer.
• The free version reaches the whole game.
• Servers are populated at ordinary hours.
• It is clearly better than the runners-up in its corner.

What costs a game its corner

Pay walls in the middle of the main loop. Shops that obscure the real price. Events that make a new player's first week worse. Servers that empty out. Any of those and the slot changes hands.