It’s been tradition for as long as anyone can remember, that the team at RPS ends the year by choosing their favourite 24 games from the preceding 12 months. In December, we reveal our picks day-by-day. We call this the RPS Advent Calendar.

It’s also been tradition that our readers, the inveterate gamblers that they are, bet on what games we’re going to pick. Crawling through our reviews, ‘What are we all playing this weekend?’ posts, and social media ramblings to gain insights to our picks. I swear last night I saw the face of a commenter at my kitchen window, scanning the room for evidence of my choices. Thank goodness, all they saw was evidence of my tightly regimented batchcooking process.

This year will mark the thirteenth year of the RPS Advent Calendar Guessing Game. If it were a child, it could now legally create a social media account and message abuse at the RPS team for including a game in the advent calendar which we didn’t review or even write about at any point in the previous 12 months. It’s an incredible effort by the event’s organiser Aerothorn and a genuine joy to see everyone getting involved.

To take part in the contest, you need to head over to the RPS Discord server and join the #2025-advent-calendar-guessing-game channel. There you will find a thread where you can submit your guesses. The first post in the channel contains the full rules, but I’ll liberally copy and paste the key ones below:

“On December 1st, Horace will emerge from his den and reveal to us one of the greatest PC games of 2025. 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.

“In the Entries thread, post a list of the 24 games that you think will feature on the RPS Advent Calendar. Specify which game is Day 24, aka the Bestest Best Game. This is the first tiebreaker. The order of the rest doesn’t matter.”

[The second second tiebreaker question is: “How many of the Advent Calendar picks didn’t receive a review on RPS?” We’re looking for an officially labeled review – not a news story, supporter post, etc.”]

“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, we’ll 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 will win.

“In the event that there is still a tie, we’ll have extra prizes for the winners.”

What’s that? Prizes?

Yes!

• 12 month RPS sub for 1st place
• 6 month RPS sub for 2nd place
• 3-month RPS sub for 3rd place

Some added details to help you make your picks.

Everyone on the RPS team votes. So this year, that means me, Callum, Edwin, James, Jeremy, Mark, and Ollie. We all privately pick ten games, ordering them from first to last. The game in first place is worth ten points, second place is worth nine, and so on, with tenth place being worth one point. I then add them all to a spreadsheet, add up the totals for each game, and the top 24 games become our advent calendar for that year. (Though, we don’t publish them in score order, except for the game revealed on December 24th – that’s what we consider to be the Bestest Best game of the year).

To be eligible for this year’s RPS Advent Calendar, a game needs to have been released or received a significant update in the past 12 months. This also means that games which are in early access are in the running. We sometimes pick games from the previous December because we had already closed that year’s voting at the point they came out.

This year will be particularly hard to guess as we have seen significant changes in the team. I only joined in October, for instance, and the game I’ve written most about is Wall World 2 – and not especially positively.

Don’t worry, though, all the guessers will be in the same boat, and in previous years, the winner has often done it by getting less than 60% of their guesses right.