How QRSong! started: a deck you build yourself
QRSong! started because I lost an argument about a song.
We were at a friend's place, someone put on a track from the eighties, and the table split over what year it came out. Somebody eventually looked it up and everyone went back to their drinks. But the arguing had been the fun part, and I remember thinking there should be a game built entirely out of that moment.
There was, of course. Retail music-timeline games existed and we had played them. The problem was that after two or three evenings, everyone knew the deck. The songs were fixed, chosen by somebody else for a general audience, and once you had heard them all the game was finished for good. What I actually wanted was that same game with our songs in it.
The first version was ugly and it worked
The first deck I made was a spreadsheet, a free QR code generator and an evening with a craft knife. One column for the song, one for the year, a QR code generated from each Spotify link, printed double-sided on card I bought at a stationery shop.
It took most of a Sunday and the cutting was wonky. But that Friday it was the best game night we had had in a year, because every card meant something to somebody in the room. Someone's wedding song. The track a friend had played on repeat for a whole summer in 2004. The one nobody would admit to liking.
That is the entire idea, and everything since has been engineering around it.
The problems that turned it into a product
Three things went wrong with the homemade version, and fixing them is what took it from a Sunday project to something I could sell.
The years were wrong. Streaming services report the release date of the version you are playing, not the original. A remastered 1975 track comes back as 2011, and a timeline game with wrong years is not a game, it is an argument with no correct answer. Getting this right turned out to be the hardest part of the whole product, and it is now checked by a combination of automated lookups and human review.
A phone camera gives the answer away. Scan a QR code with the camera and the song title appears in the link preview before you have even tapped it. That ends the round instantly. The free app exists mainly to solve this: it resolves the card and starts playback without ever showing what is playing.
One evening of cutting is fine. Doing it for every playlist is not. Which is the part that became a business: paste a playlist, get a deck, printed properly on card that shuffles.
What it turned into
These days a deck plays four different games rather than one, works on five streaming services, and the app reads Hitster cards and selected other music cards as well as ours. Companies order them as branded gifts, which I genuinely did not see coming.
The part I am still most pleased about is the smallest: the app does not show you the song. Everything else is logistics.
If you want to try the homemade route first, I wrote up exactly how to do it by hand, including the parts that go wrong. It is a good Sunday. And if you would rather skip to the deck, that is here.
Questions people ask about this
Who makes QRSong?
I do, from the Netherlands. It is a registered Dutch business rather than a hobby project, though it began as one.
Is QRSong the same as other music card games?
No. The retail ones ship a fixed deck chosen for a general audience. QRSong builds a deck from a playlist you choose, which is the entire reason it exists: a fixed deck stops being fun once everyone has learned it.
Why does the release year matter so much?
Because a timeline game is only playable if the years are right, and streaming services routinely report the reissue date instead of the original. A remaster can put a 1975 song in 2011. It is the single most common thing that breaks a homemade deck.
Do I need to buy anything to try the idea?
No. You can build a deck by hand with a spreadsheet, a free QR generator and a printer, and I have written up the method in full. It costs an evening rather than money.
