A company appears with its market capitalisation. The next one arrives without a figure, and you say whether it is worth more or less. Right, and it becomes the known company and you carry on. Wrong, and the run is over.

Eleven companies make ten rounds. Ten out of ten is a perfect day, and there are no lives, so the last call is worth the same as the first and feels considerably worse.

Market cap is not size, revenue or fame

This is where most runs end. Market capitalisation is share price times shares outstanding, which is what the market thinks the company is worth in future, not what it sold last year or how many people it employs.

A supermarket turning over billions can be worth a fraction of a chip designer with a tenth of the revenue. The list runs from Aston Martin Lagonda at under a billion dollars to Nvidia at over four trillion, which is a spread of more than four thousand to one across 120 companies and 18 sectors.

No round is a coin flip

Consecutive companies are always at least 25% apart in value. If two feel like they must be neck and neck, they are not, and one of them is a quarter clear of the other.

That is worth knowing when you are stuck. The question is never how much a company is worth. It is only which side of a number it sits on, and the gap is always wide enough to be findable.

Tactics

• Sort by sector first. Technology and semiconductors dominate the top of this list; retail, hospitality and travel occupy most of the bottom. Placing the sector gets you most of the way before you have thought about the company.
• British high-street names are smaller than they feel. A chain with a shop in every town can sit in the low billions. Familiarity is not valuation, and this is the most reliable trap on the board.
• Anchor on the number in front of you. Do not try to price the new company. Ask only whether it clears the figure you can already see, which is a much easier question.
• Respect the ends of the scale. Once you are into the trillions, the differences are hundreds of billions and intuition stops helping. There are very few companies at that level, so knowing roughly which they are is worth more than any reasoning.

About the figures

Caps are curated snapshot values rather than a live feed, rounded, and used for relative comparison rather than as a market data source. Real valuations move every day. The ordering they produce is far more stable than the numbers themselves, which is what the game actually tests.

Values are revealed one round at a time by the server, so the answers are not sitting in the payload your browser received at the start.