Getting started

1. Pick how you are playing

When you start a new game, Blitzer asks whether it is a pickup game or a Circle game. If tonight is a one-off, or you are playing with people who are not in a group with you, choose pickup. If you play with the same crew regularly, a Circle keeps all your games together. More on the difference in Circles & pickup games.

2. Get everyone in

A pickup game opens a lobby with a QR code and a short join code. Show the screen; anyone who scans the code or types it in signs in and joins from their own phone. Joining does not add them to your Circle. You can seat up to 8 players.

Add anyone who does not want an account as a guest, by name. They are scored exactly like everyone else; they just cannot open the game on their own device.

Lobby codes expire twelve hours after you create them, so an old screenshot cannot pull someone into a game that finished last week.

3. Choose colours

Each player gets a colour, which is how they are identified in the standings, the race track and every chart. In a Circle game, whoever sets it up picks colours for everyone on one screen before play starts; with six or fewer players, if they put two on the same colour, the player who had it first moves to the next free colour. In a pickup game, Blitzer assigns colours automatically as people join.

There are six colours, so a seven- or eight-player game runs out and one or two colours get used twice. Everything still scores correctly; you just have to look at the names rather than the colours.

4. Score each round

Once a round finishes, each player needs two numbers:

• Blitz pile remaining — how many cards were left in their Blitz pile when someone called Blitz.
• Cards played — how many of their cards ended up on the Dutch piles in the middle.

Blitzer does the arithmetic. If you want to know exactly what it is doing, that is in How scoring works.

If you enter something wrong, edit the round afterwards. Everything downstream recalculates, so you never have to start over.

5. Finish the game

The game ends when someone crosses the win threshold, which is 75 by default. Blitzer marks the winner and writes the result to your history.

Every finished game gets its own page that anyone can open with the link, whether or not they use Blitzer. It is the easiest way to settle an argument in the group chat the next morning.