Five dials, one score
Pick a hobby from the range below, or just drag the five dials yourself. The hiker climbs, the summit flag goes up, and the ridgeline below plots exactly how hard that hobby is to master compared with the rest.
Where your hobby sits on the ridgeline
Each dot is one of the scored hobbies, plotted on the ridgeline. The shaded area under the curve is your percentile — the share of these hobbies your score beats, fitted to the field’s own average and spread.
Ridgeline drawn from the 29 scored hobbies: average difficulty 42/100. Click any dot and its card slides out below — the same pick then lights every section on this page.
The whole range
Every hobby here got the same five dials and the same maths. Click or tap one and the card on the ridgeline above opens for it — the little number on each token is its Summit Scale score, and the tokens on your trail stay lit.
The highest and the lowest
If you want a hobby tonight, start with the gentlest trail. If you want one for the next twenty years, start with the mountain. Pick a hobby anywhere on this page and every row here shows how far it sits from your score.
🏔️ The hardest climbs
🥾 The gentlest starts
How the maths works
Each of the five dials is scored 0–10 for a hobby. Money and time count most, then your body, then where you are and what the sky is doing. Add them up, times ten, and you have a score out of 100. Pick a hobby on the ridgeline and each card below fills in that hobby’s own number.
The hobby sounds are short CC0 / public-domain clips. Pick a hobby and it plays; the 🔊 button silences the lot.
One honest caveat: these scores are opinions with reasons attached, not lab measurements. Two people could argue all night about whether fly fishing is a 60. That is the fun part — drag the dials and build your own answer. The maths is deliberately simple so you can see exactly why the hiker lands where it does.
Found one? Start it cheap.
The best hobby is the one you can begin this week. Grab a starter kit that fits your budget, then read the guide before you spend a penny more.
A commission never picks a recommendation — we only point at gear we would buy ourselves.