Medleys are tournaments where the game/variant being played changes during the tournament. Normally a tournament has just one game/variant, where as in a Medley, multiple games/variants are used in a regular rotation. Medley tournaments are a PlayStrategy innovation which aim to promote cross-gaming, one of the goals of PlayStrategy.

Medleys are available on both types of tournament on PlayStrategy: Arena and Swiss. For Arena Medleys the game/variant used changes after a fixed (or balanced) amount of time. This means players might be able to get multiple games with a given variant before it changes. In Swiss Medleys the game/variant changes between rounds, so players will get one pairing for each game/variant.

Medley's can be restricted to only include variants from a particular 'Game Family'. Each Medley tournament will list which Game Families have been selected at the top of the information box in the top left of the tournament page.

The other difference between Arena Medleys and Swiss Medleys is that Arena pre-publishes its schedule of games/variants before the start. By contrast Swiss tournaments have an element of unknown. Pre-tournament, the first round is listed by default to ensure that players know what the tournament will start with. After that, it is a surprise what comes next! When a round finishes, the game/variant that has been chosen for the next round is shown above the countdown clock. This gives players as long as the interval between rounds to double check the rules, which are linked.

All the normal traits of a Swiss still apply - pairings are unique and tournament points and tiebreakers are calculated in the same way. Arenas are still subject to streaks and berserks if selected in the settings.

New for 2023, is a new feature for medleys that is unique to arena - 'Balanced Medley'. This is an attempt to solve the issue that some games and variants take much longer to play and require more moves, so whilst previously you may have been able to play 5 Atomic Chess games in 10 minutes, you could only manage 2 or 3 Horde games in the same amount of time. In order to try and get the same number of games for each variant, PlayStrategy changes the interval time each variant is active for. This weighting is calculated by grouping the variants into 'buckets' based on their average number of moves per game. The total time of a medley is calculated (Interval time * number of intervals) and then spread over the selected games/variants according to the bucket they are in. There are four different buckets and these range from a weighting of 1.25 down to 0.75. There is also a separate classification of variants to buckets in the case that a Chess-only or Draughts-only medley is created. Finally, 1/3 of the clock time is given from the first variant to the last to account for the end of pairing period, and overlap opportunities (starting a game just before the interval is about to end). The current weightings may have to be adjusted in the future and PlayStrategy will keep an eye on how the balanced medley's are performing (all weekly Medley Shield's are now using the balanced feature).

All users can create their own Medley tournaments for any teams that they are an admin of. Simply check the 'Medley' toggle when creating a tournament, and then select which Game Families to include. If there are not enough games/variants for the number of rounds required, then the list of games/variants will be repeated. The Balanced feature is on by default for Arena but you can choose to have this off if you prefer. Medley's are listed alongside normal Swiss and Arena's using the shield icon to distinguish them from normal tournaments.

There are also default medley settings that can be applied to the tournament:

• 'Where possible, use one game per game family' - ensures that one game from each of the game families selected will be used in the Medley tournament. If there are more families selected than number of rounds, then clearly some game families (at random) will not be used. If there are less families selected than number of rounds, then one game family per round be ensured, with the remaining rounds filled at random with any unused game from the included game families.
• 'Only exotic chess variants' - Produces a Medley selecting from only the following variants: 3-check, Antichess, Atomic, Crazyhouse, Horde, King of the Hill, Racing Kings.
• 'Only draughts 64 variants' - Produces a Medley selecting from only the following variants: Brazilian, Pool, Russian - simply any draughts variant played on an 8x8 board.

If a Medley tournament is rated, then each round's rating will be applied to the user's normal rating for the given game/variant. Given the variety of games and variants, ratings are not displayed on the leaderboard and neither are they used to determine the tournament ranking.