How we make Faceoff
Five head-to-heads a day, and the thinking behind each one
Faceoff asks one question five times a day: of these two things, which is bigger? Bigger can mean more people, more seats, more years, more kilometres or more kilograms. Here's how each round gets made.
What makes a good faceoff
A round works when you know both things, the question has one honest answer, and there's a real chance you get it wrong. Tokyo against a village isn't a faceoff. A great white shark against an American bison is: most people picture the shark as the heavyweight, and most people are wrong.
So every candidate pair is scored on three things: how well known both sides are, how close or surprising the comparison is, and how fair it is to ask. Pairs that are too lopsided, too obscure or too easy to argue about never make it into a puzzle.
Checked one by one
Every matchup is reviewed on its own before it runs. We read the question as a player would, check that the numbers measure the same thing on both sides, and throw out anything we wouldn't trust ourselves. A matchup whose numbers are shaky, or whose sides most people wouldn't recognise, is rejected even if it would have made a fun question.
Some things are left out on purpose. People and places best known for atrocities don't appear, however well known they are.
Numbers that change
A city's population or an airport's passengers change every year, so those questions compare both sides in the same year and say which one: "In 2021, which country had more people?" An older year is part of the question, not a mistake.
How numbers are shown
Values are rounded to three significant figures, with K, M and B for thousands, millions and billions, so 12,327,000 people reads as 12.3M. Years are shown as years, with BC for anything before year 1, and "which is older?" rounds count back from today.
A fact in every reveal
Each reveal comes with a short fact, written for that matchup, that puts the gap in perspective or explains the surprise. The goal is that you remember the answer next week, not just whether you got it right.
Moons and confidence
After you pick a side, you say how sure you are: Safe is one moon, Sure is two, Certain is three. Get it right and you win those moons; get it wrong and you lose them. A round you're unsure of costs little on Safe, so the best players aren't the ones who know everything. They're the ones who know what they don't know.
A fresh mix every day
Each day mixes categories: places, nature, buildings, history, people and more. Nothing that appeared recently comes back for at least two weeks, so the same faces don't keep turning up.
The archive
Once a day is over everywhere in the world, it moves to the archive with every question, the real numbers and the facts. Answers stay hidden until you tap, so you can play along. Today's puzzle is always on the front page.