Play It By Ear is an audio trivia and challenge game. Components include a set of trivia cards, a game board and tokens and a game cd.
During the game, players select one trivia category (pop music, movies, tv, news etc…) from which they must answer a question. Each question is linked to one of 99 sound clips on the cd. The difficulty of the questions varies from simply identifying where the clip originated, to providing information loosely related to the sound. Some categories are more "activity" based, such as short term memory, where one has to identify something heard in the clip. In the earlier parts of the game, players can choose their own categories while in the latter, the opponents select.
In answering questions, players move around a small circular board. The first to make it to the "winner's circle" is the victor.