Rules and variants
The base rules fit in three lines. The rest are ways to change the pace once the room settles in, because the same format for two hours tires anyone out.
The base rules
The host starts a song. Everyone else races to buzz. Whoever buzzes first says the title out loud: right, they take the point; wrong, everyone else gets a second chance.
That is all of it, and it is worth keeping that way — every extra rule is one more thing to argue about mid-game.
Teams
From six people up this is almost always the better version. One phone per team, and the team decides who holds it — usually they pass it around, because each person is strong on a different decade.
The good part is the split second where somebody recognises the song and has to decide whether to buzz without being sure, with three people next to them shouting different answers.
Intro only
Play three seconds and cut. Then leave ten seconds of silence to answer.
This is the hardest variant and the most satisfying, because it rewards pure recognition rather than memory of the chorus. Use it in the second half once everyone is warm — as an opener it just discourages people.
Knockout
Get one wrong and you are out. Keep going until one person is left.
It is short and extremely tense, but it has a flaw to manage: whoever goes out first sits and watches for a long time. It works better as a five-minute closing round than as a format for the whole evening.
One decade at a time
Blocks of ten songs, one decade each, with the score resetting between blocks.
This is the best way to keep a group of very different ages in the game: your uncle loses the 2010s but wins the 70s, and at the end that is what gets talked about rather than the overall score.
Head to head
Two players at a time, everyone else watches. Winner stays on, loser hands over to the next.
It sounds exclusionary and it is not: with only two people competing the tension is visible from outside, and the audience gets more involved than it would playing.
Handicaps
When one player is clearly stronger, do not remove them — slow them down. They have to name title and artist while everyone else only needs the title, or they can only buzz after the first five seconds.
A handicap announced openly is also a compliment, and gets accepted happily. A game where the same person always wins, on the other hand, ends earlier than planned.
Countdown scoring
Every song is worth ten points at the start and loses one per second. Waiting for the chorus to be sure? That is three points instead of nine.
It turns the game into a running bet between certainty and speed, and it is the variant that stretches games out longest among people who know each other well.