GAUNTLET

One race is over in a minute. A gauntlet is a night.

Your league plays several themed games back to back. Teams drop out as it runs and take the bottom of the draft with them, the survivors go again on a theme the sealed seed already chose, and the last two play for pick 1.

10 teams, 5 games

Eliminations are spread across the games before the final, with any remainder taken early — a gauntlet should thin out fast and tighten at the end.

GAME 110 racebottom 2 out → picks 9–10

GAME 28 racebottom 2 out → picks 7–8

GAME 36 racebottom 2 out → picks 5–6

GAME 44 racebottom 2 out → picks 3–4

GAME 52 racewinner takes pick 1

Any size league

You choose how many games; the ladder follows. A bigger field can run more of them.

TEAMS	GAMES	HOW THE FIELD THINS
8	4 (2–7 allowed)	8 → 6 → 4 → 2 → 1
10	5 (2–9 allowed)	10 → 8 → 6 → 4 → 2 → 1
12	6 (2–11 allowed)	12 → 10 → 8 → 6 → 4 → 2 → 1
14	7 (2–12 allowed)	14 → 12 → 10 → 8 → 6 → 4 → 2 → 1

THE ONE RULE TO READ TWICE

A game decides only who drops out

Winning a game earns nothing. Coming second earns nothing. The only thing a game settles is which teams leave and which picks they take with them — everyone above the cut is simply safe, and carries on exactly as they were.

So if you win game one and still end up with pick 8, nothing has gone wrong. Placement above the cut is deliberately shuffled from one game to the next, because if it were not, the team bound for pick 1 would visibly lead every game it ran in and the ending would be obvious by the second one.

The final is the exception. Two teams, nowhere to hide, and the winner takes pick 1.

Sealed until the last game

A single race can publish its seed the moment it starts, because it is over forty-five seconds later. A gauntlet runs for twenty minutes, so the same rule would let anyone with a browser console work out the whole order before game two. It is staged instead.

01 · COMMIT

The whole order is decided before anyone plays

A gauntlet is not several draws stitched together. One seed is sealed and sha256(seed | team list | weights | deck) is published before the first game — the same lottery a single race runs, just shown over a night instead of a minute.

02 · DEAL

Each game publishes only its own result

As the commissioner deals a game, the server publishes that game and nothing more: who ran, who went out, and the picks it settled. The seed itself stays sealed. Nobody — the commissioner included — can compute the ending early.

03 · REVEAL

The seed lands with the last game

When the final game is dealt the seed becomes public, and every game can be recomputed from it and checked against the hash the league saw before a single ball was thrown. A swapped theme, a reordered elimination or a dropped game does not survive that check.

You pick the deck, not the order

Choose which themes can come up — horses, cars, a home run derby, a lottery machine, a plinko board. Which game gets which is drawn from the sealed seed, so the deck spins up to a theme that was already decided and cannot be re-rolled.

A deck shorter than the number of games simply cycles, and the same theme never plays twice in a row while there is an alternative.

See every theme →

Ready to run one?

Import your league or type the names. You start each game when everyone is watching.

Build a gauntlet