Game: Wavelength
Creator: Alex Hague, Justin Vickers, Wolfgang Warsch
Platform: Physical board game (also available as an online/mobile version)
Target Audience: 2–12 (nice!) people who want to play a thought-provoking party game.
We played Wavelength. This game is definitely mechanically pretty simple but it contains a lot of intrigue and excitement. We played the app version of the game, as opposed to the physical version, and there’s some slight differences, having played both in the past. In the app version, the game consists of each player looking at their phone, on which a pointer is pointed to some spot on a dial from 0-100 (say it’s at 75). The players are all then given some spectrum category, like “Fictional characters from weakest to strongest in a fight,” or “Worst to best things to do in a crowded elevator,” and then write in a text field something that could fit at that point on the dial (like saying “Bane” for 75). Then, the group all sees just the category and the response, and must collectively decide where it lies on the dial.
The game is definitely best described under the category of “getting to know you” game, and is easier when the people are not complete strangers, however having a stranger in the mix definitely changes the gameplay. Because you’re allowed to say anything, you can say something very specific “Will’s mom’s pasta,” on a scale from good food to bad food might land differently in different groups. A lot of the fun in the game comes from “messing up,” as well. In one round, I got the category, “round food ←, triangle food →,” and I was given something about 80% on the dial. I thought for a moment, and wrote in, “Pizza.” This was an unforgivable mistake. Pizza is the perfect clue for something exactly between round and triangle, as a food famously round and famously triangular as well. The group guessed way off of what it was, and I was laughingly ashamed. It’s then that I realized that the game wasn’t about coming up with clever answers, it’s about navigating social and mental frameworks. The discussions that come up after the rounds were just as interesting as the rounds themselves, if not more. Another example: there was a round where the clue was “ ← Historical tool, Modern tool →,” and the player said “typewriter.” I insisted that the dial go more to the right than left,
“Think about all of the different historical tools you could pick if it was older.” When the answer was revealed to be almost all the way to the left, we were left astonished.
“When was the last time you used a typewriter for actual work?” asked the player in question. His interpretation was that, because it was not used today, of course it was all the way historical. This led to a large debate on the topic, which resulted in lots of laughter.
Unlike in judging games, the mechanics at play in Wavelength encourage this type of behavior. The arguments are in line with a neat observation of how different peoples’ brain wavelengths are, well, different. There is far less risk in the game of people feeling bad for being “right” or “wrong,” because the goal is for everyone to win, by communicating effectively, and by trying to read the minds of the other players. This low-stakes gameplay still results in just that, gameplay—in a way that lots of other “getting to know you” games don’t really feel like games, but conversation starters.
Ethically, the game is pretty much built on a specific social norm: that we all are able to “get” each others’ clues. If someone came off of a boat from Sentinel Island and we started playing Wavelength, that person would for sure have trouble with it. There’s almost always a certain level of cultural context necessary for any game, but Wavelength necessitates a group that has overlapping norms and cultural concepts. The premise of the game is the degree to which you are able to create a qualitative understanding with your game partners, which means if someone doesn’t share those reference points—whether because of cultural background, language differences, or just wildly different life experiences—they’re basically playing on hard mode.
