WAVELENGTH

Designer: Alex Hague, Justin Vickers, Wolfgang Warsch | Publisher: CMYK

Wavelength is a weird one. This is a competitive team-based game. Each side takes a turn where a player picks up a weird proprietary contraption. You spin a wheel on this device and it displays a coloured wedge on a spectrum, randomly positioned at a point from left to right. So with a spin, the scoring wedge may be on the far left, the far right, or any position in between.

Only this one player sees this. They then close a flap to hide the wedge and offer a clue to their team based on a card visible to everyone. The card offers two extremes, such as “Terrible Food” on the left and “Good Food” on the right. The leader then proffers a clue to their team attempting to illustrate the point on that spectrum where the hidden wedge lies.

Simple example - “fungus”. That would make a spectacular clue if the scoring wedge was all the way to the left since “Terrible Food” is at that edge of the spectrum. It gets tricky when it’s closer to the middle.

The leader offering the clue must decide a strategy and then their team will need to crawl into that person’s head and puzzle out what they’re aiming at. The subjectivity of something like “Salad” makes for intense discussion.

Now imagine other cards in subsequent rounds. I’ve been in games where we’ve spent five minutes discussing the moral character of a politician and where they lie on a spectrum of “Good Person” to “Bad Person”. We’ve gone back and forth over whether a sports car was extremely fast or not terribly fast relative to other modes of transportation. All different types of subjects are broached and you learn a lot about your fellow players. You also get to revel in your opponent’s fumbling. Wavelength is all about emergent conversation and the vagaries of communication.