Finish any run on this site and you'll see a line telling you how it compared with everyone else who has managed the same place. There is no leaderboard anywhere on this site. That was a decision, and here is the reasoning — along with what actually gets stored, which is less than you'd think.
What actually gets recorded
When a run ends, your browser sends us one anonymous entry: which game, which place, the score or stage you reached, the date, and a plain count of how many runs of that game your device had finished before. That’s the whole record. No account, no name, no identifier — there is nothing in the row that says who, only what happened. (The privacy page states this formally.)
The maths of “2nd of 7”
Your rank is the least clever thing on the site, and proudly so: we count how many runs of the same place beat your score, and add one. Ties share a rank — two runs on the same score hold the same position. Once a place has a real crowd (50+ runs), raw rank stops being flattering to newcomers, so the line switches to a percentile — a percentage survives a growing crowd in a way that “seventeenth” does not. Small pools get the raw rank because being 2nd of 5 is a brag with a story in it.
Why no leaderboard
A public table of champions was the obvious feature, and we declined it on purpose. Three reasons:
- Leaderboards need identities. A table wants names; names want accounts; accounts want your email. The whole site runs on not asking. “You versus everyone who ran your home” works with no identity at all.
- Leaderboards reward the wrong obsession. The interesting question isn’t “who is the best player of this game” — it’s “am I the best manager my county has had?” That’s personal, local and funny, and a global top-100 flattens it into homework.
- Tables get gamed; benchmarks don’t care. Nothing on a leaderboard is worth defending from cheats if there’s no leaderboard. Yes, you could inflate a score with dev tools. You’d be lying to a number about your home town. The number forgives you; your county wouldn’t.
The early-days effect
While the site is young, many places have only a handful of managers — which means firsts and seconds are genuinely available. “The best Fermanagh run so far” is a true sentence someone gets to put on a scorecard, and defending it is somebody else’s reason to play. This isn’t a flaw in the system; it’s the system. Benchmarks have to start somewhere, and the people who set them get to say they were first.