Abstract We consider a real-valued function f defined on the set of infinite branches X of a countably branching pruned tree T. The function f is said to be a limsup function if there is a function $u \colon T \to \mathbb {R}$ such that $f(x) = \limsup _{t \to \infty } u(x_{0},\dots ,x_{t})$ for each $x \in X$ . We study a game characterization of limsup functions, as well as a novel game characterization of functions of Baire class 1.