A few weeks ago, my friends and I went to the UK Games Expo at the NEC in Birmingham. To make it interesting, my friend suggested we cosplay as Pikmin, plant-like characters from the Nintendo puzzle video game franchise. No one really cosplays at the UKGE so we were going to stand out, and that’s exactly what happened. The problem is we couldn’t find Pikmin costumes to purchase. My friend is a talented crocheter with over a decade of experience and she took things into her own hands and worked for months to crochet headbands for all of the Pikmin. Each of us were assigned a Pikmin to cosplay as and I picked the Winged Pikmin, but I call it the Pink Pikmin. I have a lot of pink clothes and I love how it flies and has blue eyes. My husband made a joke that I am the Winged Pikmin because I like to get high. My friend got a lot of compliments on her crocheted Pikmin headbands and so many attendees took pictures with us or of us so they could send them to their friends and family who love Pikmin. A lot of children pointed and shouted “Pikmin!” and “Where’s Olimar!” at us.
Even though I’m not someone who plays tabletop RPGs, I still had a great time seeing all the different board, card, and party games and seeing shops sell nerdy stuff. I bought a couple of decorations for the living room, these cathedral windows that you see on the wall behind me here. You can find them at Alleycats Craft. Speaking of tabletop RPGs, I saw a punk rock themed one called Punk is Dead and I might consider playing it one day because if it’s about rock and roll, I’m interested!
Now, we didn’t go all the way to a board games convention without buying a couple of games and we bought two: How Am I Weird?, which is a family friendly version of Cards Against Humanity. No dirty jokes in this one, just absurd and outlandish stuff. The other one is what we’ll be talking about in this blog post, Hitster. I think it’s a game you’ll love and that’s why I’m writing this review. My husband and I bought this game after a demo at the UKGE with our own money so I’m not sponsored by Hitster (although I’d love to be š).
Why I bought it
Well, if it’s about music, my ears perk up straight away and I was captivated by the display and hearing songs that I recognise. I’m a big fan of Sporcle quizzes and I’d often find myself playing them when I’m bored. I usually do their geography and music quizzes, but they have quizzes about everything.
Whenever I go on cruises with my family my dad, who was a radio DJ back in the 70s, always participates in the Motown trivia games and I always participate in the rock and roll trivia games: usually Beatles, Queen, or general classic rock themed. We’ve both won contests and the prizes are usually a medal, some random branded cruise ship swag, or bragging rights. Anyway, this board game is a lot like Sporcle, but with a bit of tech in it because you use your smartphone to play it. I have a radio background and while I was in university I was a radio personality at the university radio station and I had my own classic rock show, and I was doing that before I started this blog. Of course being a radio DJ and a music blogger I’d know songs and the years they came out in, for classic rock that is. However I grew up in the late 90s/early 2000s and I have a some familiarity with that era of pop music through osmosis.
Da Rules… Or How To Play Hitster
In the box there are 300 cards with a QR code to the Spotify link for the song on one side and the song title, musician, and year on the other side. You scan the code on the back and then the other person guesses where in the timeline it belongs. The songs are in all different genres and the songs span 100 years of popular music history, but most of the songs in the game are from the 60s-2010s. Not too much from the Greatest and Silent Generations’ youth. What this diverse list of songs have in common is they are chart hits. I think the reason you’re not going to see much from the 20s-40s is they didn’t really have charts back then. Billboard’s Hot 100 started in 1958 and NME’s charts started in 1952.
You’ll need to download the Hitster app and get a Spotify account to play. You can play with either a Free or Premium subscription. Depending on which country you’re in, there’s a different version of Hitster. Since I live in the UK, I have the British version of the game, but there are different versions for Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, and The United States. I have linked to all of the playlists so you can get an idea of all of the different songs in each version. No cheating! š From a quick look at all of the playlists, a lot of the songs are the same across the different country variants with perhaps a few of your country’s favourites. Top 40 music worldwide is pretty Anglosphere-centric anyway. But there are some rare moments where Anglosphere musicians did English covers of songs originally in foreign languages.
You get some choice in how you want to play it and you can make up your own rules if you’d like, like when you play Monopoly. But I’ll share the official You can choose to play as individuals or in teams, the choice is yours! Your mission is to create a chronological timeline of songs. You don’t have to know the exact year of the song or even the title of it or the musician (bonus points if you do!), but you do need to know where it belongs in your timeline. As you populate your timeline, the game gets more challenging if you don’t know what year the song came out in.
Like a lot of card games, it’s really luck of the draw in many respects: what eras you know best and which cards get drawn. Sometimes when I’ve played, I get big gaps in the timeline so it’s easy to tell where the songs belongs, but if you get too many songs from around the same year, it’s challenging. I know my classic rock, but newer songs are a bit trickier for me, but at least those I can tell are way newer because of the production and the sound. There’s a big difference between analogue and digital and even with those “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Classic Rock” songs, it’s obvious for the most part that they’re a modern take on the music of the classic rock era. There is no time limit for listening to the song and guessing and with sampling some songs can be tricky to guess with just the beginning, but once you get to the chorus you know.
The game gets more fun and interesting with the Hitster Tokens. Each person or team starts off with two Hitster tokens, which you can use in a couple of ways. During your turn you can spend your tokens that you’ve earned to pass on the song if you have no clue what year it’s from. When it’s your opponent’s turn, if you think they got it wrong, you can steal by putting the token where you think the song belongs and if you’re right, you get the song card. If you have three Hitster tokens, you can spend them to get a free song in your timeline. You earn tokens by guessing the artist and the song title correctly, even if you don’t know the year. Officially the rules say you can have up to 5 tokens at one time max, but when I play the game I don’t obey that rule.
The winner is the one who has the longest timeline. You can play to whatever timeline length you want: First one to get to 10, 15, 20, etc. songs.
Of course if the game seems too easy for you, you can always get creative and create new rules to make it challenging like having a time limit for guessing the song like they do in cruise ship music trivia games or requiring people to get the song title and artist right in order to put the card in their timeline. With house rules, your imagination is the limit!
My thoughts
Overall it’s a great game for any music fan and I highly recommend it for parties and it’s a lot of fun to play and no fuss at all. I like how everyone playing the game can participate with the clever QR code cards and you can hear the songs with Spotify integration in the app. The downside of the Spotify integration is that you’ll need to have internet access in order to play Hitster, so if you’re going camping in the woods or somewhere remote with little internet access, then it’s not going to be possible to play. Perhaps if you have Spotify Premium and you can download the songs on the Hitster playlist, someone could be the DJ, but it wouldn’t be as fun. Also if you’re someone who prefers to use another streaming service like Apple Music, Tidal, or Deezer the game won’t work with those services and you’ll have to manually search for those songs and have a DJ who doesn’t play the game. If you have the free version of Spotify you’ll only get a 20 second clip of the song.
I did notice one little mistake though with The Pink Floyd song “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2”. Hitster said that song came out in 1980, which is incorrect. It was released as a single in November 1979, but to be fair to Hitster it charted in 1980 as well, but still I consider release date of the single, not when it topped the charts or made top 40. The track was off the album The Wall, which came out in 1979, 30 November 1979 to be exact.
It’s definitely a game with potential for expansion packs and I hope there are expansion packs released because I’ll buy them. I’d even love to see an obscurities and b-sides expansion packs as well as band or genre specific expansion packs, that would make the game more challenging. Obviously with it being all about top 40 hits, those who love the hard rock, heavy metal, and progressive rock sides of classic rock won’t find a lot of their favourites in the game, but this would make for a great expansion pack.
I got the game for a discount at the UKGE. I think we paid about Ā£15 for it and I think that’s a fair price. The current price on Amazon is Ā£20, which I think is pretty fair.
You can find out more about the game here.
Liked this blog post and want to support and see more? Donate to The Diversity of Classic Rock on Patreon or Paypal or follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, buy my book Crime of the Century, click the follow button on my website, leave a nice comment, send your music or classic rock related books for review, or donate your art and writing talents to the blog. Thank you for your support!
The Diversity of Classic Rock 