How to play 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 turned out for two or more of those teams. Each athlete can only be claimed once, so the same name is worth points to whoever types it first and nothing to everyone else. The more of the board a player covers, the more the claim pays.
A match takes a few minutes, runs in the browser, needs no download, and is free to play. It ships with two modes — Rally for three to six players and Duel for exactly two.
A round, start to finish
Every round in every mode is the same four beats. Learn these and you know the game.
- 01
Everyone picks a team
Each player locks one club from the full catalogue. In Rally the picks appear live, the instant each one locks. In Duel they are sequential, and the second player never learns what the first one took.
- 02
The house deals the rest
Rally fills the board to seven teams with clubs nobody picked, chosen so the board holds roughly 50 to 90 valid answers. Those house teams score exactly like a picked one. A Duel board is the two picks and nothing else.
- 03
Name everyone you can
The clock runs and everybody types at once. A name counts if that player turned out for at least two teams on the board. Every athlete can be claimed once — take them and they are gone from the pool for everyone.
- 04
Coverage pays
A claim is worth more the more of the board it covers. A player who spans four of the seven teams is the round-winning answer, and on Legend it is worth five times a two-team claim.
Rally — 3 to 6 players
The social mode. Everyone against everyone, on one shared board.
Every player locks one club, and nobody sees anybody else's until picking is over. The picks used to appear as they locked, which sounds fairer than it played: waiting cost nothing, so the best move was to sit on your pick and read everybody else's. Now the whole board opens at once and everyone chooses against the same nothing.
Picking runs on a clock, and it is a real one — let it run out and a club is chosen for you. It will be one that fits the board; it will not be the one you wanted.
The server then fills the board up to seven teams with clubs nobody owns. Those house teams are not filler: everyone scores off them exactly as they would off their own pick. Seven is deliberate — a six-team board in a six-player lobby leaves the dealer no slot to work with, and richness collapses to a median of 17 answers. With one dealt slot reserved it recovers to around 68.
The board is dealt toward a target band of roughly 50 to 90 claimable answers, never toward the maximum. Greedy padding piles on hub clubs and produces boards of 150 to 330 answers, which flattens the game and makes cross-lobby leaderboards meaningless.
The round always ends on the clock. No Rally lobby will ever run a board dry.
- Players
- 3 to 6
- Board
- 7 teams, always at least one dealt
- Round clock
- 90s Easy · 70s Hard · 50s Legend
- Minimum coverage
- 2 teams, on every difficulty
Duel — exactly 2 players
The competitive mode. One pair of teams, two people, no padding.
Picking is sequential: player one picks, then player two, both from the whole catalogue and neither seeing the other's choice. Player two's list used to be quietly narrowed to clubs that overlapped the first pick deeply enough to carry a round — which guaranteed a playable pair, at the cost of a list that was itself a hint about what had been taken. Nothing is filtered now. The clock is real in both seats, too: run it out and a club is picked for you.
The trade is that two people can land on clubs nobody has ever played for. That is not a round, so it is not played: both teams are named to both players at the same moment, the round counts against nobody, and you pick again. Keep missing each other and the house eventually deals the pair itself.
Dead pairs are common enough to need an answer — only about 37% of club pairs are solvable at all, the median solvable pair has two answers, and 44% have exactly one. A thin pair still plays; an empty one is thrown away.
The first pick alternates strictly every round, which is why a Duel runs a fixed, even number of rounds rather than first-to-N. Counter-picking is the stronger seat, and an odd count would hand it to one player one extra time.
A two-team board can be exhausted, so Duel shows the answers-remaining counter. Nobody should lose to an invisible limit. Scoring is flat here: every valid answer covers exactly two teams, so coverage cannot discriminate and the round is decided on claim count.
- Players
- Exactly 2
- Board
- 2 teams, both picked
- Round clock
- 60s Easy · 45s Hard · 35s Legend
- Pair depth
- 8 or more known answers
Coverage is the whole scoring system
A claim is worth what it spans. Difficulty decides how steeply that is priced.
Coverage is how many teams on the board a single athlete played for. The minimum to score anything is two, and it stays at two on every difficulty. Dropping it to one on Easy would make roughly a thousand names claimable, so claiming would stop meaning anything; raising it to three on Legend would leave more than a third of rounds mathematically unscoreable, which players read as broken rather than hard.
| Coverage | Easy | Hard | Legend |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 teams | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| 3 teams | 1 | 3 | 5 |
| 4 teams | 1 | 4 | 10 |
| 5 teams | 1 | 5 | 20 |
| 6 teams | 1 | 6 | 35 |
Easy is flat — every valid claim scores one, so finding anyone is the whole game. Hard pays the coverage itself. Legend pays the steep curve above, because the hero answer is genuinely rare: on a seven-team board the best available answer covers three teams about 65% of the time and four only about 2%. Paying ten for a four-cover prices something that turns up once in fifty rounds.
What happens when you type a name
A player should fail because they did not know — never because the input rejected them.
Name matching is deliberately forgiving. Case, accents and punctuation are folded away, so "ibrahimovic" finds Zlatan Ibrahimović; surnames alone are usually enough, and the round disambiguates — if exactly one Ronaldo is a valid answer this round, that is who you meant. An exact match on a real athlete always beats a fuzzy candidate, which is what stops forgiveness from producing false positives.
A player who covers two or more board teams, still unclaimed
Scored, claimed, and announced in the feed. Nobody else can use them.
A valid player somebody already claimed
Nothing happens. A lost race, not a wrong answer — no penalty at all.
A real player who covers fewer than two board teams
Wrong. A short lockout, and the feed shows which teams they did cover.
A name that resolves to nobody
Nothing. A typo costs you the seconds you spent typing it and not one thing more.
Which clubs and players are in the game
Men's club football, twelve leagues, and a notability floor that keeps the answers nameable.
Clubs from twelve leagues are pickable. A club also has to share an athlete with at least 60 other pickable clubs to be offered at all — a barely-connected club is close to a wasted board slot, and that floor takes the catalogue from 290 clubs to 186 while roughly halving the number of thin boards.
Every other club an included athlete played for still exists in the graph as connective tissue. Malmö and Boulogne are there so that Zlatan's and Kanté's careers stay complete; they just never appear in the picker.
National teams are not pickable. They are enormous hubs — England alone carries well over a thousand athletes — and would flatten the difficulty of most boards. International caps still ride along with each career, so a national-teams board is a switch rather than a rebuild.
Women's football is a planned catalogue, not a cut feature. It needs its own ingest run and no engine changes at all.
Pickable leagues
- Premier League (England)
- La Liga (Spain)
- Bundesliga (Germany)
- Serie A (Italy)
- Ligue 1 (France)
- Eredivisie (Netherlands)
- Primeira Liga (Portugal)
- Süper Lig (Türkiye)
- MLS (USA / Canada)
- Saudi Pro League (Saudi Arabia)
- Primera División (Argentina)
- Série A (Brazil)
The words the game uses
The game is about people naming people, so the two are kept strictly apart.
- Player
- A human in a lobby.
- Athlete
- The sportsperson being named. Never called a "player".
- Team
- A club. National sides are not pickable.
- Board
- The set of teams in play for one round — seven in Rally, two in Duel.
- Pick
- A team a player put on the board.
- Claim
- A correct answer, now spent and unavailable to everyone.
- Coverage
- How many teams on the board one athlete played for.
- Stint
- One spell of an athlete at one team, with dates.
That is the entire game. Go and win one.
Free, in the browser, no download. Bring two friends for a Rally or one for a Duel.