How to play Hitster: the rules, editions, and modes

Hitster is built on one simple idea: hear a song, work out roughly when it came out, and place it in the right spot on your timeline. It's quick to teach and hard to put down, and over the years it has grown into a whole family of editions and modes. This guide covers all of it, the core rules, the tokens and steals, the tougher game modes, the main editions, the Bingo spin-off, and how to get a game that plays the same way with no cards at all.

The basic rules

Every edition shares the same core. On your turn, you scan a card's QR code with the free Hitster app, which plays the song through a linked streaming account. You listen, then place the card on your timeline where you think it belongs, before or after the songs already there, based on the year it came out. Then you reveal the year: if you placed it right, the card stays on your timeline; if not, it's discarded and play passes on. The first player to build a timeline of ten correctly placed songs wins and is crowned the Hitster.

Earning and spending tokens

There's more to a turn than placing cards. Name both the song's title and the artist correctly and you earn a token, and you can pick one up even on a turn where you misplace the card. Tokens work like a currency: you can hold up to five at once, and trade three of them for the top card of the deck, which goes straight onto your timeline with no need to guess its year. They turn a game of pure guessing into one with a little strategy.

Stealing a card

Tokens also let you pounce on someone else's mistake. On an opponent's turn, if you think they've placed a card in the wrong spot, shout "Hitster" and drop a token onto the position where you think it should go. If you're right, you steal the card onto your own timeline. Two players can't target the same spot, so a shaky placement can spark a scramble as the rest of the table tries to work out where the song really belongs.

The harder game modes

Once the basic game starts to feel easy, the rulebook offers tougher ways to play:

• Pro: you have to name the artist and the title to keep or steal any card. Everyone starts with five tokens and earns no new ones.
• Expert: you have to name the artist, the title, and the exact year the song came out. A brutal test for serious music buffs.
• Cooperative: the whole table plays against the game instead of each other, and every wrong placement costs the group a token.

These modes work with any of the boxes, which is where the range really opens up.

The Hitster editions

Each Hitster box is a standalone game, and most can be shuffled together into a deeper deck. The lineup shifts from country to country, but the main editions are:

• Hitster Original: the flagship, with a broad spread of the biggest hits of the last hundred years.
• Hitster Summer Party: summer anthems across the decades.
• Hitster Guilty Pleasures: the cheesy, outrageous hits people love to hate.
• Hitster Celebration: a premium set with fancier cards and wooden tokens, mixing fan favorites with recent hits.
• Hitster Battle of the Generations: a bigger deck of around 420 cards split across distinct time periods, built for old-versus-young games.

Alongside those sit themed decks for narrower tastes, such as Hitster Rock, Hitster Christmas, Hitster Movies & TV Soundtracks, and Hitster Urban & Hip-Hop, plus regional editions like Hitster 100% NL that lean on a local music scene. Which ones you can actually buy depends on where you live.

Hitster Flying Mic

The newest twist, launching in September 2026, trades quiet turns for a scramble. A song starts and everyone races for the flying microphone, and whoever grabs it takes on a musical challenge: naming the title or artist, calling solo or band, or humming the melody. Pull it off and your team wins the card to place on its timeline. It comes with around 225 hits and, like the others, runs on a box of cards plus the Hitster app. There's a full rundown on the Hitster Flying Mic page.

Hitster Bingo

There's also a completely different way to play. Hitster Bingo swaps the timeline for a musical bingo card: songs play, you mark the matches on your grid, and the first to complete a line calls it. It uses its own set of songs and can be folded into the wider Hitster collection, so it makes an easy change of pace on a long games night. For all their variety, though, every one of these shares the same setup: a box of cards, the app, and a streaming account to play the music.

How to play it with no cards and no Spotify

If that setup is the part you'd rather skip, a game that plays the same way exists fully digital. Tunigma runs its own guess the song and guess the year timeline game entirely in an app: it plays the songs itself with no cards, no Spotify, and no other streaming app, and it comes with thousands of tracks you can filter by decade, genre, and country. You still hear a song, place it by year, and earn a token for naming the track and the artist, but there's nothing to print or scan. It's a free download on Android, with an iOS version on the way, and there's a fuller tour on the Hitster alternative page.

Hitster is a trademark of its respective owner. Tunigma is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hitster.