I recently attended a weekend-long birthday getaway for an old college friend, and as soon as I arrived, he pulled out a box and said, "You have to play this game."
And he was right.
Hitster describes itself as a Music Party Board Game, and that's accurate. The point of the game is to build a "musical timeline," based on song samples pulled from cards in a deck. You have to use your phone to scan a QR code to play the song (via Spotify, so it does require an account), and then identify when the song was released.
You do get bonus points if you can name the artist and the song title (or if, another time, you fail to identify the song correctly, and you swoop in and get it right). But the release date is the most important part, which is a neat twist. Each card is labelled with a year on the reverse side, and each time your team takes a turn, you have to slot the card into the correct place in your timeline as it relates to your other songs (laid out from left to right on the table in front of you, with the 1920s on the left and the 2020s on the right).
The fun part is that even if you don't know a specific song artist or title, you can maybe (hopefully) figure out when the song came out, based on its production values. But even that's easier said than done. Is that a jangly 60s pop song? Or is a mid-90s indie rock song with a similar throwback guitar tone? Is that a classic 80s over-reverb'd snare drum, or a 2010s homage to an old 80s hit?
The other trick of the game is that the song cards you draw will represent a random spread of time. Maybe you get lucky and end up with one or two cards per decade, making it easier to create your pop culture timeline. Or maybe, like one of the teams we played with, you end up drawing cards for songs that were released almost exclusively between 2015 and 2019, making it hard for them to identify the specific sonic cues required to place the songs in order.
It's a good party game not only because it involves music, but also because everyone can play. One person might have a particular expertise in identifying, say, metal songs from the 70s and 80s. But someone else may be more well-versed in Top 40 music from the 2010s, or the 1950s. And even if you're just not that great at music overall, it's still an interesting challenge to try to listen to the sonic cues that could help you place the song.
Either way, I'll probably still win, though.
Hitster: The Music Party Board Game
Previously:
• Twitter party game/Prisoners' Dilemma: 'I Eat Poo'
