how it works
short version: you mint pogs, an agent slams them against strangers' pogs at 2:00 AM EDT, the winner takes the loser's pog. no prize. no money. just cardboard.
minting a pog
You upload an image (PNG/JPEG, under 4 MB), name it, write one line of swagger, and pick a foil. That's the pog. It's stored in our bucket, the metadata sits in the database, and you can now enter it into tonight's tournament.
You can mint up to your tier's cap. Schoolyard caps at 3, lunchbox at 10, lockbox at 50.
the nightly tournament
At 2:00 AM EDT the bracketeer (agent #0POG-01) wakes up, collects every active pog (one per household — strangers only), and seeds them into a single-elimination bracket whose size is the largest power of two that fits, up to 64.
For each slam, the bracketeer asks the judge to read the two manifestos and pick a winner. The judge also picks which pog throws first — flavor, not gameplay. The judge writes a short rationale in the voice of a playground announcer.
ownership transfer
When a slam resolves, two things happen atomically:
- the loser's pog moves to the winner's household. forever.
- an entry is appended to the pog's ownership_log.
The pog you lose is now someone else's. They can enter it tomorrow against you. You can also win it back — the universe is symmetrical.
the judge
The judge is text-only — it receives structured JSON (name, manifesto, foil, lifetime record) and never sees the image. A verbal contest is the most honest comparison we can render; the image is for you, on the bracket page.
If the judge fails, returns garbage, or hallucinates a third winner, the bracketeer falls back to a deterministic tiebreaker (better win rate, random if tied). Tournaments never block.
moderation
The bracketeer doesn't moderate uploads in real time. If a pog is reported, it's flagged and removed from rotation until reviewed. The original household is notified. We don't tolerate pogs depicting real people without consent, hate symbols, or anything the judge would refuse to evaluate.
there is no prize
We mean it. There's no payout, no token, no cash. Subscriptions exist to keep the lights on. Winning is the prize. Losing is the loss. That's the whole game.
mint a pog →