Game List Guide
A tier list is easy to start and hard to finish well. The first pass usually goes fast — favorites land near the top, disappointments near the bottom — but a tier list that still makes sense to you six months later takes a bit more discipline than sorting by gut feeling alone.
Start by deciding what the list is actually ranking. "Best games" and "games I had the most fun with" are two different lists, and conflating them is the most common reason a tier list stops making sense partway through. A technically excellent game you never finished belongs in a different conversation than a rough, buggy game you played for two hundred hours. Pick one lens and stay with it.
Separate your criteria before you separate your games. Gameplay, design, storytelling, replay value, and innovation pull in different directions — a game can be mechanically brilliant and narratively forgettable, or the reverse. Deciding in advance how much weight each factor gets keeps you from re-litigating the same argument with yourself for every entry.
Build from the middle out, not the top down. Most people's instinct is to start with an S-tier and work downward, but the middle tiers are where the real information lives — that's where most games actually sit, and sorting them first gives you a baseline to measure the extremes against. Put your five or six most obvious picks aside, sort everything else into rough bands, and only then decide what actually deserves to sit above or below that baseline.
Resist the pull of recency. A game you finished last month is fresher in memory and easier to overrate than something you played five years ago and genuinely loved. If a recent game is jumping straight to your top tier, ask whether it would still be there after the initial excitement fades — and if you're unsure, it's fine to leave it unranked for a few weeks before placing it.
Expect to revise it. A tier list isn't a one-time verdict — it's a snapshot of how you're weighing things right now. Revisiting it after finishing a new game, or after replaying an old one, is normal and often reveals that a ranking you were sure about six months ago doesn't hold up the way you thought it would.
Once you've got a rough order in your head, generating a filtered list by platform or title and exporting it is a good way to get the list out of your head and onto something you can actually revise over time, rather than re-deciding the whole thing from scratch every time you think about it.
It also helps to write one sentence explaining each placement, at least for anything near a tier boundary. If you can't articulate why a game sits above another one, that's a sign the ranking is running on vibes rather than the criteria you set out with — and it's usually the fastest way to catch a placement you'll disagree with later.
Consider keeping ties visible rather than forcing a strict order within a tier. Real preferences aren't always fully ordered — two games can occupy the same tier for genuinely different reasons and still be equally deserving of that spot. Flattening every tie into an artificial 1st-versus-2nd ranking often introduces more noise than it resolves, especially near the middle of a large list.
Finally, treat unfinished games as a separate category rather than skipping them entirely or guessing where they'd land. A game you dropped partway through tells you something different than a game you finished and disliked, and conflating the two muddies a list that's otherwise trying to be honest about your actual experience with each entry.