Which game should you play?

Two of the three games ask the same question over and over — which of these two names do you prefer? — and differ only in how many times they ask it and what they do with your answers. The third does not compare names at all; it asks about one name at a time.

Tournament Bracket

A knockout draw, exactly like a sports tournament. Names are paired up, winners advance, losers are out, and the last name standing is your champion.

The draw is seeded from the order you ranked your names: your top name is matched against your lowest-ranked one, your second against your second-lowest, and so on. That's deliberate. It means the names you already suspect are contenders are kept apart until the later rounds, rather than one of them being eliminated in round one by an accident of the draw.

When your list isn't a power of two — and it usually isn't — the bracket is padded out with byes, and those byes go to your highest-ranked names, who skip the first round. Prefer to leave it to chance? The preview screen has a randomise button that shuffles both the matchups and the byes.

Rank Match

A full round robin. Every name is compared against every other name, and each name's score is the number of times you picked it.

Because nothing is ever eliminated, the standings are meaningful all the way down. You get a genuine second, third and fourth place — useful when you want a shortlist to sleep on, or when you're choosing a first name and a middle name together.

Name Dating

One question per name, and the easiest question there is: do you like it? Swipe right to keep a name, left to set it aside, or star the ones you love. There is nothing to compare and nothing to rank — just a stack of your own names, one at a time.

Setting a name aside does not delete it. It drops out of the deck, but it stays on your list and you can take it back from the shortlist screen. Swiping is quick, and quick means the occasional mis-swipe; nothing here is destroyed by one.

Which should you use?

• Sixty names you haven't looked at properly — Name Dating. One swipe each, nothing to compare, and what comes out is short enough to be worth playing properly.
• A long list you haven't cut down yet — Tournament. It's designed to get from many to one quickly.
• A shortlist of six to ten finalists — Rank Match. The vote count is manageable and the full ordering is exactly what you need.
• You need a first and a middle name — Rank Match. Your top two are right there.
• You're not in the mood to decide anything — Name Dating. It only ever asks whether you like the name in front of you, and you can stop after four cards without having wasted the effort.
• You're doing this with someone else — run the same list through Tournament separately and compare champions. Agreement is reassuring; disagreement tells you precisely where the conversation needs to happen.
• You want it to be fun — Tournament. The bracket filling in and a final round genuinely creates a bit of drama.

You don't have to choose once

The most effective approach is usually more than one of them, in order. Swipe a sprawling list through Name Dating to get it down to the ones you actually like, run a Tournament over what survives to cut it to a handful without much effort, then run Rank Match over those to order them properly. Your names stay saved between games, so each pass costs you nothing but another sitting.