Hitster

Hitster is a music-based party game published by Jumbo. Instead of answering questions from a trivia booklet, players listen to songs and arrange cards in chronological order. Each song card has a QR code that can be scanned with the Hitster app to play the track through Spotify. The card’s other side reveals the song information and release year, which players must not see before making their choice.

On a turn, a player hears a song and decides where its card belongs in their growing timeline. It might have been released before every song already there, after them all, or somewhere in between. Once the player places it, the card is turned over. If its position is correct, it stays in the timeline; if not, the player does not keep it. The first player to collect ten correctly placed cards wins.

That rule gives Hitster a challenge distinct from simply naming songs. A player does not need to recall an exact year to make a successful placement. Recognizing the recording’s era, or comparing its sound with tracks whose dates have already been revealed, may be enough. As a timeline grows, however, there are more possible positions to choose from. A song that is obviously newer than one card might still be older than the card beside it.

Players can also identify a song’s title and artist, and Hitster includes tokens for additional competitive play. Those elements reward musical knowledge, but the central test remains the release-date timeline. Someone who knows every word of a chorus can still misplace the record; someone who cannot name it may nevertheless judge its place correctly.

The QR codes are essential to the game’s format. They turn a physical deck into a way of hearing the recordings being judged, rather than asking one player to hum a tune or read a clue aloud. The printed answer remains hidden until after the placement, so the same card provides both the musical prompt and the means of checking it. The original edition has hundreds of song cards, giving players many different tracks to sort across successive games.

Jumbo has released other Hitster editions, including *Guilty Pleasures* and *Summer Party*, with different music selections. Across those editions, the recognizable idea is the same: hear an actual song, commit to where it belongs among previously dated songs, then turn over the card to find out. Winning depends not on collecting points for every familiar track, but on building a ten-card timeline that survives each check.