The Grand Dean of an ancient, abandoned Victorian Theatre has a brilliant idea to rebuild it back to its former glory. Discovering that ragtag teams of utterly horrible musicians have been sneaking in and using the theatre for practice sessions, he decides to put every last remaining bit of his fortune into organising a tournament and invites these completely untalented teams to participate. They would be challenged to perform various musical scores in an extremely short amount of time. This is deliberate just so the true talents will be quickly picked out from the rest. The winning group shall hence be personally groomed by the Grand Dean himself into a world class orchestra team, where they would properly represent the currently dysfunct Theatre and make it famous again!
You are ringleaders of your own groups of musicians, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become famous. Starting from a skeleton crew of horrendous talents, you will grow in strength and ultimately evolve into a mighty orchestra fit for any world stage.
Cantabile Blitz is played in Stages, which are then broken down into Performances. Every player starts off with the same set of basic dice, each die representing a musician of one type of instrument. At the end of every performance, the Grand Dean will reward better performing groups with more cash, which in turn allows them to recruit better and more musicians into their team. This is represented by more types of dice, eventually reaching a fully fleshed out orchestra. There are no turns in this game, and the actual musical performances are in real time. As soon as a musical score even remotely resembles its original tune by any of the groups' plays, the group can quickly submit their recording to the Grand Dean. However, the group that submits the score and ends that performance does not necessarily always win that round. They do have bonus points for doing so, but other bands might have raked up more points by completing more segments in the music sheet!