Promotion, Relegation and the Pile of Shame: Give Your Backlog a Proper Fixture List

It's dark by half four, the kettle's on its third shift, and you've just opened your games library, scrolled past about forty titles you definitely meant to play, and closed it again without a word. Welcome to the annual November stand-off with the backlog.

Here's an idea that's worked for me and roughly four other people, so treat it as scientifically robust: stop keeping a list and start running a season.

A list is a guilt document. A season is a competition

The problem with a backlog is that it has no shape. It's just a longer version of the same game you never finish. A season, by contrast, has fixtures, a calendar, an end point, and the faint hope of silverware. You're not clearing a queue — you're managing a club with a wildly mismatched squad and a chairman (you, at 11pm, in a dressing gown) who has opinions.

Thirty-eight games makes a nice league. If you've got fewer, brilliant — you're a smaller, more honest club. If you've got two hundred, pick thirty-eight and send the rest to the reserves, where they can think about what they've done.

Sort by length, not by genre

Everyone sorts by genre and ends up with fourteen RPGs in the same division and no time to play any of them. Length is the only honest metric:

• The Sprint Division (under ten hours). Your Gone Homes, your short horror games, your "it's only four hours, I'll do it Sunday" titles. Fixture these weekly. They actually finish, which is the entire point.
• The Championship (ten to thirty hours). The meat of the campaign. Two or three a month and you're flying.
• The Big Lad Division (thirty hours plus). One, maybe two per season. They get the long winter nights and nothing else. Never fixture a ninety-hour epic against a six-hour indie in the same fortnight — that's how clubs fold.
• The Perpetual Also-Rans. The games you've been saying "I'll get to it" about since roughly the first lockdown, bought because a video essay made them sound like a personality trait. One fixture a season, in a dead rubber. If they lose, they go down without fuss.

Fixtures that survive real life

Two fixtures a week is the sweet spot. Not two completions — two sessions. Tuesday and Thursday, or Sunday afternoon plus whichever weeknight the other half is out. Miss one because of a late shift, a mate's birthday, or the boiler giving up in a way that costs four hundred quid, and it isn't a failure. It's a postponement. Rearrange it; don't cancel it.

The trick is that a fixture is a start, not a promise of a finish. Ninety minutes on a Tuesday counts. That's how you get through the Big Lads without it feeling like homework with extra steps.

The cup run is where the weird stuff happens

Once a month, one tie is a cup game: a short, strange, experimental thing you'd never normally load up. The two-hour curio. The horror game with the daft name. The freebie you felt smug about claiming. Cup ties are allowed to be terrible — that's the format. You play it, you decide it was either magic or rubbish, and you move on without the guilt of abandoning a league campaign.

Fair warning: if the curio turns out to be brilliant, congratulations. You've got a promotion candidate and a new favourite to bang on about to people who didn't ask.

Promotion and relegation, ruthlessly applied

This is where the season earns its keep. You pick a game up, give it six hours, and genuinely don't want another minute. That's a relegation. Down it goes, no shame, no asterisk.

Equally, if something you'd written off as a B-side suddenly clicks at hour nine and you're thinking about it on the bus, it goes up. The table is a living document and nothing in it is sacred.

And yes, you're allowed to relegate a game you paid fifty quid for. Sunk cost is not a fixture. The money's gone; the evenings are still there to be spent on something you actually like.

Rule twelve: the transfer embargo

This is the bit that makes the whole thing work, and it's the bit everyone breaks within a fortnight.

No new purchases while a season is live. Not one. Not the 90%-off "bargain" in the weekend sale, not the £4.99 indie that "doesn't really count", not the sequel to the thing you haven't finished. Sale emails go into a folder marked AFTER THE SEASON and they stay there. Wishlist it, close the tab, walk away.

Two exceptions, granted grudgingly:

1. Genuine co-op. If your squad is actually playing it this month and the alternative is sitting in the lobby like a spare part, buy it. Real football has loan signings for a reason.
2. Freebies. If it costs nothing it doesn't count — but it still has to earn a fixture like everybody else.

Everything else waits. And here's the payoff: when the season wraps in spring and you open that folder, about two-thirds of those bargains will look exactly like what they always were — a discount on something you didn't want. The rule pays for itself.

Keep the paperwork light

Resist the urge to build a forty-tab tracker with conditional formatting. A note on your phone, a sticky note on the fridge, or a shared spreadsheet with the one mate doing the same thing is plenty. Shouting about a shock relegation in the group chat is the actual reward.

What you get out of it

You finish things. You play three or four games you'd otherwise still be promising yourself. You discover that two of the Also-Rans were genuinely good and one was a lie you told yourself during a sale. And you get a far better answer to "what are you playing at the minute?" than a sigh and the word "backlog".

Season kicks off next weekend. Pick your divisions, fixture it early, and remember: it's a long campaign, and the chairman isn't sacking you.