Sixteen clues, four songs, four clues each. Tap four clues you think point at the same song and submit. Get it right and the row locks. Get it wrong and you lose one of four lives. Everyone in the world gets the same grid, in the same shuffled order, on the same UTC day.

The rule that makes it hard

No clue ever contains a word from its own song's title or from its artist's name. That constraint is enforced by a unit test rather than by an editor remembering, so it holds across all 45 puzzles and 180 songs in the set.

It changes what a clue can be. You never get a fragment of the chorus. You get the producer, the album, the year, the video, the sample, the film it soundtracked, the court case. Naming a different artist is allowed, which is where a lot of the misdirection lives.

Reading a grid

An illustrative set of four, not from the game: Rick Rubin produced it, a Nine Inch Nails cover, 2002, filmed in a single shot. Two of those name other people entirely, and neither is the answer. That is the normal shape of a Medley row.

The colours are difficulty, not category. Green is the song most people get, red is the one that catches them, and every grid has exactly one of each tier. If you have found green and yellow, the eight clues left are the two hardest songs, and the ones you were least sure about are probably in the red row.

Tactics

• Start with the year. Most grids carry a date clue per song. Four dates spread across four decades is the fastest partition available.
• Do not submit a group you like three of. The fourth is where the trap is set, and a wrong submit costs a quarter of your lives. If you are confident about three, look for the odd one out among the remaining eight rather than the best-looking fourth.
• One away is worth more than it looks. It tells you three of your four share a song, so you have found a real group and picked one wrong member. Do not scrap the selection. Swap one clue at a time.
• Shuffle when you are stuck. It only reorders the tiles, but the grid arrangement is doing more to your reading than you think.

Where the clues come from

Every puzzle is written by hand. Nothing here is generated, which is the reason the set is 45 puzzles rather than thousands: each song needs four clues that are true, findable, and that together point at exactly one track. A clue that fits two songs is a broken puzzle, and those get cut rather than shipped.

Which grid you get is worked out from the date, so it is the same for everybody and you cannot reroll it by refreshing.

You are shown a music video and its view count. A second video arrives without one, and you say whether it has more views or fewer. Get it right and that video becomes the known one. Get it wrong and the run ends.

Eleven videos make ten calls, and ten out of ten is a perfect day. Everybody gets the same eleven in the same order, worked out from the date.

The numbers are live

View counts are read from the YouTube Data API when the puzzle loads, not stored in the game. So they are the real current figures, and they move. A video you narrowly called yesterday may have passed the one you compared it against.

The pool is 157 hand-picked music videos, deliberately mixing all-time monsters with merely enormous ones. If every pair were Despacito against an album track the game would be trivial, so the list is built to keep comparisons close.

What people get wrong

• Chart success is not view count. A song can be everywhere on radio and stream well while its video does modest numbers. What you are ranking is the video, and the video is a different product.
• Age beats popularity more often than you expect. A 2012 video has had over a decade to accumulate. A huge 2023 release is often still behind something you had half-forgotten.
• Watch for kids and karaoke. Nursery-rhyme-adjacent and endlessly-replayed videos accumulate views in a way that has nothing to do with whether anybody rates the song.
• The gap between one and two billion is enormous. Once you are in that range, small differences in your intuition are worth hundreds of millions of views. Anchor on the number you can see rather than on your sense of scale.

Streaks

Your streak counts consecutive days played and lives in your own browser rather than on an account. Miss a day and it resets. Clear your site data and it goes too, which is the trade for not making you sign up for anything.

The other four dailies

This is one of five. Artistle is the guess-the-artist game, Medley is Connections for songs, Before or After asks which of two songs came out first, and Daily Blind Ranking makes you rank ten artists without knowing who is coming. Missed one? The archive goes back to each game's launch.