Hitsgame

Build your own version of the game Hitster. The resulting cards contain a QR code that point to an audio file on a webserver, no Spotify is needed to play. The program generates a pdf with cards like this:

Ingredients

Ingredients:

A collection of properly tagged flac files. These files must have the TITLE, ARTIST, and ORIGINALDATE or DATE tags set.
A webserver that can serve static files.
Sheets of A4 paper, preferably 180 g/m².
Tokens from the original Hitster game, or a suitable replacement, e.g. poker chips.

Hardware tools needed:

A printer.
Preferably a paper cutter, alternatively scissors.

Software tools needed:

Either Nix 2.17.0, which can provide all the needed packages, run with nix develop --command ./mkhitsgame.py.
Or install manually:
- Python ≥ 3.11 with qrcode==7.4.2 package.
- ffmpeg 5.1.3 or n6.1.
- rsvg-convert (from librsvg) 2.55.1 or 2.57.1.

Preparation

Create a directory named tracks and put the tracks in there that you want to include.
Create a file named mkhitsgame.toml next to the tracks directory, and add the configuration as shown in the next section.
Run mkhitsgame.py. It will print statistics about the track distribution over years and decades, so you can tweak the track selection to balance out the game.
You now have two new directories: build and out. out contains the tracks, compressed and anonymized. These files contain no metadata, and the file names are long enough to be virtually unguessable, so they are safe to serve from a public webserver without additional authentication. build contains the pdf with the cards, as well as intermediate svg files.
Upload the contents of out to your webserver.
Print build/cards.pdf and cut out the cards.

Configuration

The mkhitsgame.toml file follows the following format:

# The url prefix that your webserver will serve the track mp4s from.
url_prefix = "https://example.com/"

# Font to use on the cards.
font = "Cantarell"

# Whether to draw a grid around the cards. If you want to inspect the pdf on
# your computer, or if you are cutting the cards with scissors, you probably
# want to enable this. If you are cutting with a paper cutter, you should
# disable the grid, because if you don't cut *exactly* on the line you'll end
# up with ugly lines on the sides of the cards.
grid = true

# Whether to include crop marks at the sides of the page. If you are cutting
# with a paper cutter, you should enable this to know where to cut.
crop_marks = false

For the webserver, you need to configure it to serve the .mp4 files with audo/mp4 MIME type. For Nginx, you can do this using the following snippet:

types {
  audio/mp4 mp4;
}

How to play

Refer the original game rules for how to play the game itself. You do not need to connect Spotify. Scanning a QR code will open the track in your browser. Most browsers will auto-play the track.

License

Hitsgame is free software. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.