The RPS Advent Calendar guessing game is underway for 2018

Every year in December, the RPS team pick the 24 best games from the previous year. We then reveal those games across the month, one a day, and call it the RPS Advent Calendar.

Also every year in December, the Advent Calendar Guessing Game is organised by the fabulous members of the RPS forums, in which readers of RPS trawl through our reviews, features, Twitter accounts, rubbish bins and so on in order to work out our favourite games before we've worked out our favourite games. Anyone can sign up and enter and this year you might win RPS supporter status for the trouble. So why not give it a go?

The rules are simple and explained in detail in this year's already in-progress forum thread. I'll summarise:

1) Post in that forum thread and list the 24 games you think we'll pick. Just like our list, they don't have to be in any particular order except for the bestest-best game we'll name on December 24th. This will be used as a tie-breaker.

2) Answer the second tiebreaker question: “How many Advent Calendar games are available on the Nintendo Switch, as of December 1st?”

There are other guidelines for how to submit the list at the link above. If you get the most games correctly, you'll get a code that'll grant you access to the RPS supporter program. This doesn't include the free games and items you get if you buy the package through Humble, but it does get you the ad-free version of the site and the three exclusive supporter posts each week.

That forum post also includes lots of quotes from me, but I should repeat those parts here, too.

Games that are eligible for selection includes anything that was released this year in any form, any game that left early access this year, or any game that we deem to have been "of this year" in some way. A significant update which made it newly relevant? Yeah, sure. This theoretically means that we could award a game that's been picked before in a previous advent calendar.

As for our selection process, we give each member of staff 10 points to spend how they wish. They could give ten games one point each, or six games one point and two games two points each, or they could give one game all ten of their points. The hope is that this means that a game that one person intensely loved can still beat a game that six people moderately enjoyed. I think this is important, when there are now so many games being released and so many games that only one person on the team had time to play.

Finally, I should note: we pretended that we hired three video people, a guides writer and a new deputy editor in order to do new cool things on the site, but really it was just to make the Advent Calendar guessing game much harder.

Don't fear: last year's joint winners took the prize with only 58% accuracy. I bet you could do better than that. Go on, have a go.

Thanks to Aerothorn for organising all of this every year.