Overlap, answered.
Everything people ask before their first match — what the game is, who is in it, how it scores, and what it costs. If you want the rules in full, read how to play.
The basics
- What is Overlap?
- Overlap is a live multiplayer football trivia game about shared clubs. Every player picks a team, the house deals the board out to seven, and then the clock runs while everyone races to name footballers who played for two or more of those teams. Each athlete can be claimed once, so speed matters as much as knowledge.
- Is Overlap free to play?
- Yes. Overlap is free, runs in the browser, and needs no download or install. You only need an account so your matches can be recorded against the seasonal leaderboards.
- How many players do you need?
- Between two and six. Duel is exactly two players. Rally takes three to six. Both modes are available as a private lobby with a room code or through matchmaking.
- How long does a match take?
- A few minutes. A Rally round gives you 90 seconds on Easy, 70 on Hard and 50 on Legend, and a match is five rounds by default. A Duel round is shorter — 60, 45 and 35 seconds — across a fixed, even number of rounds.
- Can I play Overlap on a phone?
- Yes. It is a web app, so it runs in any modern mobile or desktop browser with no install step. Typing quickly is the only thing a bigger keyboard genuinely helps with.
Rules and scoring
- How does scoring work in Overlap?
- By coverage — how many teams on the board one athlete played for. The minimum to score anything is two teams, on every difficulty. Easy pays a flat 1 point per claim, Hard pays the coverage itself, and Legend pays a steep curve: 2 points for a two-team claim, 5 for three, 10 for four and 20 for five.
- What happens if two players name the same footballer?
- Only the first one scores. A claimed athlete is removed from the pool for everyone and shown in the feed with who took them and for how many points. Naming an already-claimed athlete is not a wrong answer and costs nothing — it is a lost race, not a penalty.
- What happens if I make a typo?
- Nothing at all. A name that resolves to nobody costs you only the seconds you spent typing it. A lockout is reserved for a confidently wrong answer — a real footballer who does not cover at least two teams on the board — and even then the feed shows you which teams they did cover.
- Do I have to type a footballer’s full name?
- No. Matching folds away case, accents and punctuation, so "ibrahimovic" finds Zlatan Ibrahimović, and a surname on its own is usually enough. The round also disambiguates: if exactly one Ronaldo is a valid answer, that is who you meant.
- What is the difference between Rally and Duel?
- Rally is the social mode for three to six players on one shared seven-team board, scored by coverage. Duel is the competitive mode for exactly two players on a single pair of clubs, with sequential picks, a hidden filter that keeps the pair playable, and flat scoring decided on claim count.
The data
- Which leagues and clubs are in Overlap?
- Clubs from twelve leagues are pickable: the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, Eredivisie, Primeira Liga, Süper Lig, MLS, the Saudi Pro League, and the Argentine and Brazilian first divisions. A club also has to share an athlete with at least 60 other pickable clubs, which brings the catalogue to 186 clubs.
- Are national teams included?
- Not as pickable teams. National sides are enormous hubs and would flatten the difficulty of most boards. International caps are still stored with each athlete’s career, so they cost nothing and a national-teams board stays a future switch rather than a rebuild.
- Is women’s football in Overlap?
- Not yet. Version one ships men’s club football only. Women’s football is a planned catalogue rather than a cut feature — it needs its own data ingest and no changes to the game engine at all.
- Which footballers are in the dataset?
- Careers are built from Wikidata, filtered by a notability floor so that every valid answer is somebody a knowledgeable fan could plausibly name. Obscure squad players who would only ever be guessed by accident are left out.
Accounts and competition
- Does Overlap have a ranked mode?
- Not yet, and deliberately so. A rating needs a playerbase before it means anything. What ships instead is seasonal leaderboards — a monthly ladder plus a board of the best single rounds anyone has played — labelled as performance rather than skill.
- How do the seasonal leaderboards work?
- A season is a calendar month. Players are ranked on their average share — the fraction of the points on offer they actually claimed — and need ten qualifying rounds to appear. There is also a best-boards table, which a single great round can put you on from day one.
- Can I play Overlap with friends privately?
- Yes. Create a lobby and share the room code. Both modes work as private lobbies as well as through matchmaking, and the host chooses the mode and difficulty.
Still the fastest way to find out.
Free, in the browser, no download. One round and the rules explain themselves.