Welcome to the eighth annual Advent Calendar Guessing Game!
On December 1st, Horace will emerge from his den and reveal to us one of the greatest PC games of 2020. He will do this for 24 days, on the final day revealing the Bestest Best game of the year.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to predict which twenty-four games will be selected by doing the following:
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Make a list of the 24 games that will feature on the advent calendar, and specify which game is Day 24, aka Bestest Best Game. The order of the rest doesnāt matter.
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Answer the following tiebreaker question: āHow many of the games have a pettable dog?ā (as verified by @canyoupetthedog or my independent research if that account provides no answers)?"
Thanks to generous support from Graham, The top three finishers will each receive a 12-month subscription to RPS. In the event of a ties not resolved by tiebreakers, I have a two extra keys I can dig out; if there are no extra ties, Iāll distribute one to myself, and one to the generous individual who helps me update the master tracking sheet 
Iām still updating the Master Tracking Sheet, and will link that when this is ready.
The Rules
Entering Your Guesses
List the 24 games you think will appear on the Advent Calendar, as well as which game you think will be the final, Bestest Best pick on Day 24 (our first tiebreaker). Please list the game titles, and only the game titles, in your list; this allows it to be easily pasted into our tracking sheet You are of course welcome to put commentary before/after the complete list.
Please also answer the second tiebreaker question: ā āHow many of the games have a pettable dog?ā
Editing Your Guesses
You can edit your post to change your picks any time before the first Advent Calendar pick of 2020 is revealed (typically done on December 1st). All edits after that point are invalid.
Winning the Guessing Game
You get a point for every pick that appears on the calendar. At the end of the competition, the person with the most points wins, the second-most is the runner-up, and the third-most is the runner-up runner-up. In the event of a tie, weāll use the following tiebreakers:
The individual who correctly guessed the Bestest Best game is the winner.
If both/neither leaders guessed the Bestest Best game, the person with the closest guess for the second tiebreaker (pettable dogs) will win.
In the extraordinarily unlikely event that there is still a tie, weāll have extra prizes for the winners.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who picks the games?
All current full-time staff. As of now, that is Graham, Alice B, Alice O, Katherine, Ollie, Nate, Imogen, and Colm, as well as brand-new staff Jake, James and Ed.
What is the selection process?
Per Graham:
āEach person is given ten points to spend as they please: if they want to give all ten to one game to make sure it featured, that was fine (though no one has yet done this); if they want to change their votes based on how the list is shaping up, perhaps to take them away from a safely included game and add them to something on the borderline, that is fine, too.
The idea behind this system is to reward more of the games that we truly loved. It encourages people to focus on their true favourites rather than make the numbers up to ten just for the sake of it. And this way, a game that two people ājust likedā would not always trump a game that one person loved. If that love was strong enough, it could still get on the list. This system also works better at a time when there are more games than ever that only one person on the team has played, a reflection of both the increased number of games being released and the current teamās wonderfully diverse tastes.ā
What games are eligible to receive awards?
Also per Graham:
āitās eligible if it was released this year, if it exited early access this year, or if it was otherwise substantially updated or changed in a way that made us decide it was the Year Of This Game.
The latter situation has not happened, I donāt think, in the five years Iāve been involved in the list. The other two both have.ā
Can Early Access Games receive awards?
Yes: a number of early access games have received awards, including three previous GOTY winners (Minecraft, Kentucky Route Zero, and Dead Cells).
What about games released in December 2019? Or December 2020?
Yes, though itās unlikely - both of these situations happened exactly once in the seven years Iāve been tracking the competition. In 2015, Just Cause 3 made the list despite being released on December 1st, 2015 (due to RPS getting a review copy earlier). In 2017, OneShot got an award, despite being released and reviewed in December 2016.
