About Aux Wars

Aux Wars started as a multiplayer music game about the oldest argument in the world: who has the best taste? Every round you get a prompt (a vibe, a moment, or a single artist) and everyone submits the song they think nails it. The lobby listens to a snippet of each pick, votes (never for their own), and the crowd decides.

It has since grown into a full collection of online music games. Alongside the classic battle there is Song Off, a head-to-head test of how deep your knowledge of one artist goes, and Alphabet Challenge, where naming the biggest artist for a letter is worth real fan counts. Then there are the dailies: five short music puzzles a day, the same for everyone in the world, built for people who already have a Wordle habit and want a music-shaped one too. Everything runs free in the browser, on your phone or your laptop, with no app to install.

Who makes it

Aux Wars is built and run by Adam, a developer in Cheshire, working alone. No company, no team. The same person writes the puzzle datasets and the code, which is why the daily games share a house style, and why a bug report tends to get answered by whoever caused it.

The day job is senior development on SaaS and e-commerce products, and there are about fifteen years of tech and SEO behind that. None of which helps with the hard part. You cannot optimise your way to a Medley grid that has exactly one answer; somebody has to sit there and write four true clues about a song without using any word from its title.

This started as a technical itch rather than a music project. Real-time multiplayer is a genuinely interesting problem, and a lobby of people voting on each other's songs is a good excuse to build one: everyone has to watch the same state change at the same moment, nobody can be trusted with the scoring, and somebody will always close their tab halfway through a round.

The music credentials are thinner. He does not play anything and has never made a record. What he brings is having listened far too closely for far too long and being unreasonably confident about it, which turns out to be the correct qualification for a game that asks whether Starboy belongs in an artist's top five.

Aux Wars is one of a small network of browser games built by the same person: Shareholder Party, Tavern Party, Puzzle Party, Car Football and Kart Party. They share an approach rather than a codebase: free to play, no install, no account unless you want one, and built to be opened by a group of people who are already together.

If something is broken or a song was wrongly rejected, the contact page reaches him directly.

How the games are made

The daily puzzles are hand-built rather than generated. Medley's 45 grids were written one at a time, and its 180 songs carry 720 clues between them, every one checked by hand. Artistle draws on a curated list of 432 acts whose formation years and line-up sizes were looked up rather than scraped. Before or After dates its 236 songs by original release rather than by a later remaster.

That is why there are dozens of puzzles rather than thousands. A generated grid can be wrong in ways nobody notices until a player loses to it, and losing to a broken puzzle is the fastest way to stop playing a daily game.

The multiplayer modes lean on public music data instead: iTunes for artist catalogues, Deezer for most-played rankings. Where a game needs to know whether something is really a song by a given artist, it is checked against that catalogue on the server rather than guessed at in the browser.

Credit where it's due

This game exists because of PatCC and his brilliant “Aux Wars” series, where friends battle to play the best song for a theme and get judged for it. This site is an independent, fan-made take on that format for the browser, named in homage to the original. It is not made by, endorsed by, or affiliated with PatCC. Go watch his channel; it's funnier than we'll ever be.

The music

Every song plays through the official YouTube embedded player. We never host, store, or re-stream any music. We simply embed the videos players choose, exactly as YouTube provides them, and each snippet player is destroyed when its turn ends. All content belongs to its respective owners and plays back with full attribution through YouTube.

Made for the group chat

No installs, no accounts required. Send a link and you're playing in under a minute. Create an account if you want your stats, match history, and a ranked rating to brag about.