MusicLink: Match Albums by Who Played on Them

Album covers keep dropping. Tap two that share an artist, or a musician who played on both, and they clear. Let the stack reach the top and it's over.

That's MusicLink. It's a web prototype right now, built to work out the mechanics before the iPhone version, and you can play it in your browser.

What counts as a link

Two albums link when they're by the same artist, or when any person credited on one also appears on the other. The less obvious the connection, the more it pays:

• Same artist: 100. Two Nirvana records.
• Solo or side project: 200. The shared person is one of the two artists. Wings and Paul McCartney.
• Deep cut: 300. A musician who isn't the headline act on either record. Duane Allman is on an Allman Brothers Band album and on Derek & The Dominos' Layla.

Keep it going

Link again within five seconds and the next one is multiplied: ×2, ×3 and up.

After a match, the cleared group stays open for a few seconds. Tap a third cover that links to anything in it and it clears on its own at ×2, then ×3, then ×4. In the clip above, Derek & The Dominos clears with the Allman Brothers through Duane Allman, and then Blind Faith joins the run through Eric Clapton.

Two links in a row with no misses earns a wild card in the next drop. It links to anything, for 150.

A miss doesn't take points away. It just makes the next cover arrive almost immediately, which is worse.

Pick your own record collection

The catalog picker is a genre tree, six groups and 24 sub-genres, plus decades from the 1950s to the 2020s. The game only draws from what you select, so you can play nothing but grunge and desert rock, or 1970s everything.

The current build has 1,140 albums by 666 artists, with 7,565 links between them.

Memory mode

Flip the switch and covers turn face-down five seconds after they land. Tapping one peeks at it. Points are worth 1.5 times as much, and you will find out quickly how well you know what Rumours looks like from the back.

When it ends

Game over doesn't just show a score. It walks you through up to eight links that were sitting on the board the whole time, deep cuts first. Every one is a connection you could have made.

Play MusicLink. Two more posts cover where the catalog comes from and how the game was tuned.