Alphabetish currently features 749 music acts spread across eight decades, from the 1950s to the 2020s. Each decade is a category you can play on its own, with its own daily puzzle, its own puzzle number and its own streak.
Pick a decade you actually lived through and the game becomes considerably more forgiving. Pick one you did not and it becomes a proper challenge.
Every category runs independently. A bad run in the 1980s will not touch your 1970s streak, and each one numbers its puzzles from its own launch date. You can switch between them freely from the categories panel inside the game.
There is also a master pool that draws from every decade at once. That is the default puzzle, and it is the hardest of the lot, because you cannot narrow anything down by era.
Every act on these pages was added by hand and checked. They are sorted into the decade they are most strongly associated with, which is a judgement call rather than a science: plenty of acts worked across several decades, and a few could reasonably sit in two or three. No act appears in more than one decade.
One firm rule: acts with digits in their names are excluded. The game strips everything that is not a letter before it builds the board, so a name containing numbers arrives with pieces missing and the puzzle feels broken rather than difficult. That is why a handful of very famous bands are absent.
Missing somebody obvious? Let me know via the contact page. The list grows regularly.