Game modes

Timeline Blastar is one game with many launchers. The shooter mechanics are the same — what changes is whose posts fly at you. Pick the launcher that matches your mood: your own feed for catharsis, a famous handle for laughs, a custom post for a single targeted blast, or the multiplayer arena for a real fight.

Free 𝕏 levels

These are free for any logged-in X user. They're fed by a server-cached corpus, so we don't burn live X-API budget when you launch them.

💎 Blast Timeline of the Day

A daily mix of the highest-engagement original posts (no retweets) from across the platform, refreshed once per calendar day and seeded by the corpus our authed players have already populated. Same set for everyone that day — competitive scoring works because of it. Great as a daily warmup.

🌟 Shooting Stars (handle presets)

Pre-curated celebrity / founder / tech accounts you can blast on tap: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Naval, Paul Graham, Garry Tan, Marc Andreessen, Balaji, MTSlive, Ashley Vance, Founders Podcast, Palmer Luckey, Jason Joyride, Beff Jezos, TBPN, Nikita Bier, plus Sam Altman. The latest 50 tweets from each are cached and refreshed periodically. Pick a handle from the picker; their tweets become the boss queue.

The picker also has an ANY HANDLE input — type any X handle (no @) and launch. The first launch costs COINS to fund the live X-API pull; subsequent launches within the cache window are free.

🧬 Blast Monster Timeline

Same data as the Elon preset, but every boss-post is rendered as a procedurally-composed monster instead of a plain post card. The monster's parts are pulled from a sprite library we generate via image AI on the server, so each post has a unique creature. If you like the visuals, this is the mode for you.

Premium levels

These pull live from X and cost COINS per session.

𝕏 Blast My Timeline

Your own X home feed, fresh as of the moment you click the button. Up to 50 posts. This is the original mode of the game and it's the one most worth your COINS — your real feed, your real annoyances, your real catharsis.

⭐ Blast a Custom Handle

Type or paste any handle you want to blast. Pulls the latest 10 tweets, no preset cache. Use this to roast a friend, settle a thread argument, or process whatever is currently on your nerves.

🔗 Blast a Custom Post

Paste any X post URL. The game extracts the tweet ID, fetches that single post, and starts a session with it as the first boss followed by cached fill from the TBPN feed. Useful when there's one specific tweet you want to take apart.

More free timelines (not X)

These don't need X login at all — handy when X has rate-limited everyone or you just want a different feel.

🟧 Hacker News Blastar

Top of HN, pulled live. Same shooter, but the "post card" is the HN article header with comment count and score. Score-fed engagement bar, so high-scoring HN posts have more HP.

📚 ArXiv Blastar

Latest papers from arxiv. Use the Discovery beam (slot 8) to pause on a paper for 20 seconds and read the abstract — sometimes the best part of the run.

🧬 PubMed Blastar

Same as ArXiv but the medical-research firehose. The bosses tend to be larger because the abstracts are longer, so weave more.

🎧 Podcast Blastar

Each podcast EPISODE becomes a boss-post — episode title, show artwork, a 300-character description chunk, and a 30-second ambient preview of the actual episode audio that fades in when the boss spawns and cuts hard the moment you kill it. Long episodes (think Hardcore History and Lex Fridman 4-hour marathons) translate into chunkier bosses with proportionally more HP, so blasting a 4-hour episode is a real session.

The picker has two ways in: a curated grid of 30+ hand-picked tech / business / history / science / interview / space shows (Lex Fridman, Acquired, Founders, Hardcore History, Huberman Lab, Tim Ferriss, All-In, Dwarkesh, Latent Space, MTS, TBPN, and more), and a search box that hits Apple's free iTunes search API or accepts a pasted Apple Podcasts URL. The show list is operator-curated and refreshed; new shows are added via a hackend tab so the in-game picker is always up to date without any client deploy. Got a podcast you want in the game? DM @jamji_jamaramji — the catalog is hand-edited.

A note on the preview audio: your browser fetches the public episode mp3 directly from the podcast's RSS-published URL — same file the podcast app would pull. We never proxy or re-host it, and we never record it into your blast clip (no copyright pit). Podcasts can opt out by removing the file from their feed. Music ducks to 40% while the preview plays so it doesn't muddy the mix.

💥 Blast The Mix

Round-robin across HN + arXiv + PubMed + Bluesky + Mastodon + recent YouTube/Dev.to. Variety run; never the same twice.

Multiplayer

👥 Blast Battle

Real-time 1v1. Each round is first-to-N hits, with a Pong-reflect mechanic on Q (10s budget per round, bounces enemy bullets back). Best-of-3 rounds wins the match. Stats persist on your profile (W/L, longest win streak, favorite gun). See Profile → Battle History.

Pairing is via a public lobby. If nobody's there, you can challenge a specific handle — they get a notification next time they log in.

Shareable links

Every game mode has a direct URL — paste it anywhere (X, email, DM, your blog) and the recipient lands straight in that mode:

Modes that need an X login (Stars, custom post, X timeline, creator levels) auto-trigger the Welcome modal if you're not signed in — your shared link still works after login.

Onboarding flow (first-time visitors)

If you've never played before, the title button doesn't go to a menu — it goes straight into a single banger blast (the week's top tweet from the corpus), then keeps going with the day's top-10. No tutorial, no level select. We get you to the first kill in under 10 seconds. Once that wave ends, the regular options surface unlocks.

Want to know how to play these well, not just launch them? → Blasting tactics.