[1][2] Hosted by Tom Gleeson, the show is a spin-off of his "Hard Chat" segment on the satirical television news program The Weekly with Charlie Pickering.

[7] On 26 May 2019, Gleeson was announced as a nominee for the Gold Logie Award for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television.

It was announced by Gleeson on 31 July 2019, in a radio interview with Triple M, that the show's return in 2020 for its fifth series would see it expand to 40 new episodes.

The contestants, using their monitors, lock in their answers to each of the five multiple-choice questions from a subject Gleeson has chosen in advance.

In this round, general knowledge questions are given out for a rather vague time limit (between 35 and over 90 seconds, depending on the episode).

In the event of a tie for lowest scorer when an elimination is required, the tie is broken with a "hard-off", where Gleeson presents two options for a given question (often pertaining to the relative difficulty of two given tasks or physical hardness of two materials), which the first contestant to buzz in then answers.

The final two contestants alternate answering questions regarding their chosen subject area in a best of five penalty shootout-style format with the winner receiving a trophy – the limited-edition big brass mug, or in the case of the "Battle of The Duds" episodes, the aforementioned big brass mug with a hole in the bottom.

Each contestant will be required to guess the correct answer, starting with the player that got the first question during the final round, and the closer of the two wins the show.

[267] In 2020 a Dutch version of the show called Hard Spel premiered, hosted by comedian Richard Groenendijk.