branching-style models were proposed in the 1960's as a logician's tool to study combinations of tenses and modalities, as in ``it is still possible that it will rain in sd tomorrow'' but ``it is already settled that last summer was hot in sd''. a current theory of branching space-times (bst), put forward by n.~belnap in 1992, is an axiomatic framework that aims to describe how indeterminism plays out in a spatio-temporal world. to this end it postulates a set of relativistic space-times, any two of which are pasted together in some particular region. although a bst structure is continuous, it is possible to discretise it, by focusing on particular objects, known as transitions, and interpreted as places at which chancy actions happen. a discretised structure, defined as a partially ordered set of transitions, recovers then much, but not all information about the initial structure. as these ideas are reminiscent of the causal set program, i will end up the talk by discussing some connections between the two frameworks.