Today, we’re extremely excited to announce DropMix, a brand new game that we’re making in partnership with our friends at Hasbro. DropMix is a fast-paced music mixing game where players create one of a kind mixes by playing cards featuring hit songs from award-winning artists. It’s completely unlike anything else you’ve ever played and we hope it will give you that same deep connection to your music and your friends that our previous fan favorites like Rock Band or Dance Central have offered.

So, how do you play DropMix? Each card in DropMix represents a different part of a song – like vocals, bass, drums, etc. As you place cards on the electronic DropMix board, which connects to a free app on your iOS or Android device, you and your friends will hear a custom mix start to take shape in real-time. We’re starting off by introducing Clash Mode, where you can either face off against one friend to play 1v1, or team up to take down two buddies 2v2. There’s a lot of depth and strategy to Clash Mode, but the core idea is that you earn points by playing cards and it’s a race to 21. There’s also an option to save your mix to your device, so when you’re playing and you’ve got those cards sounding just right, you can save it for you and your friends to enjoy.

DropMix will be coming out in September 2017, and we’ve got over 300 DropMix cards in store for the 2017 collection, across a variety of genres, so there’s sure to be something for everyone. On top of that, sometimes mixes sound even better when you combine cards that span very different genres! Take a look at some of the songs that’ll be coming to DropMix later this year

Officially revealed today, Dropmix isn’t played on a console or PC, but a physical board in conjunction with an app for iOS or Android. The game is about dropping differently-colored, NFC chip-carrying cards —each representing a song— into corresponding “Mix Slots” to create original mashups while battling other players for control over said mix. Green cards contain bass lines and harmonies, yellows have your leads (mostly vocals), reds play melodic loops and blues lay down beats. Each card has a power level between one and three, and the player’s goal is to score points by playing equal or higher numbered cards on top of their opponents’. You can also spin the “Equalizer” wheel to knock out a randomized level of card. Introduce a handful of wild cards into the mix, and you’ve pretty much got a sense of the game.

As we wrapped up, Ahn told me that the game would retail in September for $99.99, with collectible card packs going for $14.99 and $4.99, and my conflicted feeling worsened. On one hand, Dropmix’s tech was really impressive. On the other, the game felt too passive and simple to warrant such a hefty price tag.