CityWar is a leaderboard of 5,908 real cities, ordered by how much money has been put behind each one. That is the entire mechanism. There is no algorithm underneath it, no weighting, and nothing that anyone at CityWar decides. This page is the complete description of how a city gets a position and how it loses one.
What one dollar buys
One US dollar contributed is one point of city score, credited as soon as the payment clears. Score is cumulative and it never decays: a point earned in week one is still on the board in week four.
A contribution also publishes an optional display name and an optional message on that city’s page and in the live feed. That is the whole product — a position on a public board and a line of text next to it. No money reaches a city government, a municipality, a tourism board or a resident, and CityWar is not affiliated with any city it lists.
How the board is ordered
Cities are sorted by total score, highest first. #1 is whichever city has the most money behind it, #2 is the next, and so on down. A city with no money behind it is not on the board at all — it is unclaimed, it still has a page, and it is still searchable, but the site will not print a position for it.
That last rule matters more than it sounds. On a board where nothing has been backed, every city would technically tie for first, and printing “#1” on all 5,908 of them would be true in the way that a lie is true. So an unbacked city shows a price rather than a position: what it would cost to put it on the board.
What happens on a tie
When two cities are level on score, the one that was backed first holds the higher rank. That has one consequence worth stating plainly: matching a city’s score does not pass it. To take a position you have to exceed it, which is why every “what it would take” figure on this site is the gap plus one dollar rather than the gap.
The rule exists so that an equal top-up never demotes the city that got there first. Without it, two cities on the same score would swap places every time either one was touched.
Rank is relative
A city’s score only ever goes up. Its rank can go either way, because rank is a position among other cities rather than a property of the city itself. A city that has not been touched in a week can fall ten places without losing a single point — ten other cities simply passed it.
The reverse is also true: a city moving up always moves another city down. Nothing is taken from the city that was passed. It was out-scored.
What deliberately does not count
Four things a reader might reasonably expect to matter, and do not:
- Population. A city of 20 million and a city of 120,000 are worth exactly the same per dollar. Every city page shows its population because it is a genuine fact about the place, but it is not an input to the ranking.
- Votes, clicks and views. None of them move a city. The only thing that moves a city is a cleared payment, which is also what makes the board hard to manipulate.
- Editorial judgement. Nobody at CityWar promotes a city, features a city, or adjusts a position. There is no override.
- How recently the money arrived. Score is not time-weighted. A dollar from three weeks ago counts the same as a dollar from a minute ago — though only the recent one shows up in momentum.
The other ways score arrives
Contributions are the obvious route, but they are not the only one. Every city page sells 5 business listing spots, bid for from $25 upwards, and a city can also carry a paid floating ad. Money spent on either of those counts toward the city’s score at the same one-dollar-one-point rate.
That is a deliberate design decision rather than an accounting convenience: a local business buying a spot on its own city’s page is backing that city, and treating its money as somehow less real would make the board a worse description of who is actually behind a place.
Seasons
The board runs in seasons of 30 days. Within a season score accumulates and nothing resets. Past champions are recorded in the Hall of Fame.
Checking any of this
Every figure quoted anywhere on this site is derived from the two things described above: the catalogue, which comes from the GeoNames open geographic database, and the score, which comes from cleared payments. The board is public, the arithmetic is on this page, and the number needed to change any position is printed on the page of the city that would have to pay it.
If you want to see the mechanism running rather than described, the closest battles on the board page shows the tightest gaps and the exact figure that would flip each one.