HAVE YOU PLAYED?
The icebreaker game for people you already know, Wavelength
“Do you know what I mean?” Is the conversational equivalent of sending up a flare or broadcasting an SOS when you feel that you’re just not quite connecting with the person you’re talking to. So much of life is like this – everyone getting along, but no one really understanding what anyone else actually means. Wavelength, by Alex Hague and Justin Vickers (creators of Monkiers – a twist of the ‘folk game’ Celebrity), with Wolfgang Warsch (Quacks of Quedlinburg,
The Mind, and Ganz schön clever amongst many other), is a kind of neurotic icebreaker game best played with people you know really well.
In our age of Zoom calls and distancing and thinning of social fabric, games that we can play with others that offer us the casualness of life that we’ve been missing have been vital. Wavelength may have been one of those you’ve regularly met up with people online to play. While there’s plenty of copycat versions of the game online to aid you in this, it’s worth looking at the real deal to remind ourselves what we’re missing.
WHAT IS IT?
First and foremost, Wavelength is a big old bit of plastic in a really brightly designed box. The physical object that goes into making up most of the game is a large plastic dial which offers a rotating face and something akin to a modesty screen for a clock. The main face of the Wavelength dial is turned by using the cog on the outer side of the face while the blue screen is closed so as to achieve a random position.
The rest of the players on the psychic’s team get to move the red dial in front of the blue screen to where they think the psychic moved the mark to, only aided by the clue they are provided by the psychic. A clue to what though? Everything in the game is on a scale. Stupid to brilliant. Has a bad reputation to
had a good reputation. For kids to for adults. There is nothing that can’t be put on a scale, for which the psychic will need to think of a clue for. For example, bad superpower to good superpower, when the face is set to something like 10 o’clock on the dial might be “knowing the name of everyone’s dog by sight,” – whereas if the face was closer to three o’clock you might offer a clue like “flying.”
Which sounds simple, everyone knows that flying is a good superpower. But the real question is not only “how good does the person giving us the clue think it is?” but also, is it better than matter manipulation, teleportation, chronomancy? Is flying a superpower that we could say for sure is 100% good, or is it more like 70% good when you really think about it? Players will then begin to argue over what indeed is a good superpower until they decide that actually, it’s kind of an 85% thing.
And then the other team (we’re playing in teams remember) gets a go at guessing left or right of the current position. Once everyone’s decisions are locked, the screen is whipped back to the anguish and joy of everyone around the table, or indeed, on the Zoom call. Gather some points, if you can remember to do that before the conversation descends into relitigating whether, indeed, ponies are more “for kids” than “for adults.”
As an icebreaker game for people who you already know ...it’s an efficient way to discover everyone’s smallest hill on which they would be willing to die.
WHY SHOULD YOU TRY IT?
The simplicity of the game’s loop is one of its main attractions. Will your friends pick up on the fact that you think Jason Statham is the greatest actor of his generation? Or will they assume you’re gunning for the consensus that he’s naff because he does action films? There’s a gratification in having given the perfect clue, and because as the psychic can’t speak beyond that clue, it really does have to count.
It has the same air of playing Pictionary with people you already know quite well, or have a lot in common with, your minds will all work in similar ways and you’re all likely to be pulling from the same well of inspiration. If you’ve ever had two teams use the same drawing for the same clue, like both drawing two men failing to get a sofa up some stairs for the word ‘pivot’ then you know what we mean.
Wavelength edges players towards that without the drawing, just the knowing of one another.
Most of the time, if you’re playing online, you’ll want to play the cooperative mode for the game. This switches from two teams competing with one another to the equivalent of a single team attempting to score the most points. Of course you’ll never tot up the points in these situations, it’s more about the arguments as to whether Gary Lineker is ‘more classy’ or ‘less classy.’ The psychic thought he was quite classy whereas the rest had varying opinions of his attributable class, none of them particularly well founded, heartfelt, or good.
In the Zoom format you’re going to have to ignore a few things in the rulebook. The rules suggest that players should not use specific numbers, or percentages, or o’clocks and instead Chuckle Brother’s their way between the hot and cold end of any particular argument. This is a little more difficult in the harsh light of an online call, and with a game this featherweight, we can forgive a little forgiveness on these rules.
As an icebreaker game for people who you already know – but maybe not to the level of granular and strange detail that Wavelength brings out – it’s an efficient way to discover everyone’s smallest hill on which they would be willing to die. And in a world where we are all still reaching around for as many crumbs of real humanity as possible, there’s something important about being able to unearth your friends’ strange and odd opinions. Would you usually make time specifically to find out that your friends have very specific feeling about how a dishwasher should be stacked? Probably not, but it’s these little vulnerable threads that we can all pull at in these strange times to let other people know they’re still here. If you know what I mean.