How to run a beat battle with your friends

A beat battle is the oldest game in production: everybody makes something under the same constraint, then everybody listens and decides. It is genuinely fun with two people and it scales to a room. It is also easy to run badly, and the failures are all the same four.

The format

• Agree the constraint before anybody opens anything. Tempo, length, and a time limit — those three and nothing else.
• Everybody makes their entry within the limit. No extensions, and no working on it between rounds.
• Listen back to every entry in full, in a random order, without knowing whose is whose.
• Everybody rates every entry, including their own or excluding it — pick one and keep it the same all night.
• Reveal who made what after the scores are in, never before.

Why the constraint has to be shared

If one person writes at 90 BPM over sixteen bars and another writes at 140 over four, there is nothing to compare. The entries differ in ways that have nothing to do with skill, and the vote comes down to which style the room happens to like. Fixing tempo, meter and length removes every variable except what somebody actually did.

The strongest version goes further and takes the tempo out of everybody's hands. A tempo nobody chose means nobody arrives with something half-written, which is the difference between a contest and a show-and-tell.

The time limit is the whole game

Somewhere between three and ten minutes. Under three and it is a typing test; over ten and people start second-guessing and the energy goes. Four is a good default: long enough for drums, bass and one idea, short enough that nobody can polish.

Keep it the same for everybody and start it at the same moment. A limit that starts when each person starts is not a limit, it is a suggestion.

The four ways it goes wrong

• Names attached to entries. People vote for their friends and for whoever they think is best rather than for what they just heard. Anonymise the playback and this disappears entirely.
• No fixed listening order, so the last entry wins. Recency is a real effect. Randomise the order every round.
• One person judging. It turns a game into an audition, and the judge stops enjoying it by round three. Everybody rates.
• Rounds that run long. Six entries at sixteen bars is six minutes of sitting still after the work. Keep entries short — eight bars is plenty to be judged on.

Scoring

Out of five, on the whole entry, with no categories. Splitting it into drums, melody and mix sounds fairer and is not: it rewards the entry that is competent everywhere over the one that did something interesting, and interesting is what everyone came for.

Running it online

GrooveArena is this format, automated. It rolls one tempo for the room, gives everybody the same eight empty bars and the same four minutes, then plays every entry back anonymously and collects a rating out of five from each player. The full rules are here, and a private room takes one link and a display name — no account needed to join if somebody is only playing once.

The reason to let software run it is not convenience, it is that the timer and the anonymity are the two rules people are worst at enforcing on themselves.