Screen & music

The decade column is your best friend

Almost every topic in this family grades you on a decade, and decade is an ordered trait — which means a yellow cell is not a near miss, it is a precise instruction. Yellow says "one decade away". Guess a film from the 1990s, see yellow, and the answer is either 1980s or 2000s. One more guess resolves it permanently, and now you are choosing from a decade instead of a century.

This is why a scattergun opening works badly here and a deliberate one works well: your first guess should be something you can place in time confidently, even if you have no feeling for the answer at all.

The screen topics

Movies

Graded on decade, genre, director and box-office scale. Directors are the sharpest column in the game — a green there usually ends the round on the spot, so a well-known director's most famous film is a strong opening guess. Genre is unordered, so treat it as a straight yes/no.

Disney & Pixar Films

Decade, studio (Disney or Pixar — a coin flip you win or lose outright), setting, and whether it is a musical. Setting is the fun one: kingdom, jungle, ocean, city, space, desert, ice, toy world, the afterlife. A green on setting narrows an eighty-year catalogue to a handful of films.

Superhero Movies

Decade, universe (MCU, DC, Sony, Fox X-Men, other), solo or team-up, and scale. Open with a team-up from the universe you know best — it fixes two columns at once, and the universe column alone cuts the pool by roughly two thirds.

Streaming Shows

Decade, genre, season count and origin. Season count is numeric, so you get ▲▼ arrows: guess a three-season show, see ▲, and every long-running series is suddenly back on the table. Prestige dramas and reality shows sit at opposite ends of that column.

Sitcoms

Decade, setting, main cast size and country. Setting — apartment, office, bar, home, school, hospital, restaurant, small town, shop — is the column that identifies most sitcoms in one word, and cast size separates the ensemble shows from the two-hander ones.

Cartoon Characters

Show, decade, species and whether they are the hero. Species is the most enjoyable column in SIXTH: human, mouse, dog, cat, duck, sponge, bear, rabbit, bird, fish, pig, alien, robot, squirrel. One green there and you are usually two guesses from the answer.

The music topics

Songs

Decade, artist, genre and how big the hit was. Artist is an exact-match column, so it is rarely green — but genre plus decade together are enough to corner most rounds. If you are stuck, guess the most famous song of a decade you have already confirmed.

Music Artists

Peak decade, genre, country and scale. Peak decade means the decade they were biggest, not when they started — a useful distinction for the artists whose careers span forty years. Country is unordered here, so a wrong country tells you nothing about direction.

Boy Bands & Girl Groups

Country, decade, member count and gender line-up. Member count is numeric with ▲▼ arrows, and it is more decisive than it sounds: groups cluster hard at four and five, so an arrow pointing away from that cluster is real information.