I played Wavelength for the first time for this critical play. Wavelength is a game by the company CMYK, and it is a board game intended for groups of friends above the age of ~14 I would say.
While I found the experience interesting and fun, I do think there are some elements of the game that would be more fun to play with someone I already know. I’ll begin with some elements that I admired about the game: I loved that it was simple to set up and easy to play. Using the instruction pamphlet, it took me about one minute to determine the important rules for the gameplay. I loved the overall design of the game — it felt simple, inviting, and approachable. The game harnessed fellowship fun, discover fun, and challenge fun to create an engaging experience. I thought the spectrum cards were great, and I thought a fun mod to the game could be to encourage players to create their own spectrums too (something like “smart –> funny” for example, where the two items are not strict opposites, creates interesting and fun discussion in my experience playing these kinds of games. Overall, I thought the design was well done. It reminded me of a game we call “spectrum” where you draw a 2×2 on a whiteboard and have people place themselves in relation to the two axes. It also reminded me of Prioroties, a game I love dearly where players rank objects from least to most important to them. Both of these examples allow for slightly more nuance and personal spin (“expression” fun!), elements I would’ve appreciated here.
There were a few elements of the game that I would change or adapt. I think the strict binary limited some of the interesting nuance and complexity of the game. I think including more prompts that are not strictly opposites could have been interesting and fun. I found the game entertaining, but I thought it would be more fun with people I already know well. While the game is good for getting to know people, this moment of connection usually happens when the correct placement is revealed, and you do not necessarily learn about your teammates along the way outside of those moments. We couldn’t really engage in the fun “putting ourselves in their shoes” part of the game because we did not know each other at all, so the game became more of a guess-and-check experience. I noticed that the funniest hints were the fictional ones, or prompts that disregarded the spirit of the spectrum. I wonder if including a few funny examples in the instructions could encourage more deviation from the obvious. Along those lines, it was also clear to me that the funniest debates happened when the spectrum was not at either extreme — those answers felt too obvious and were no longer fun or interesting.
In terms of role within the group, I did notice that our conversations about where the correct placement was revealed more about our own beliefs and preferences than our knowledge of each other. I think our participation was fairly even, and I think the game’s mechanic of consensus decision-making required significant buy-in even on off turns, which I appreciated.
In terms of ethical considerations, I will turn to speaking for a moment about the norms the game responds to. There were a lot of spectrums related to person characeristics, which have the possibility of causing harm if they surface existing biases that the players may hold. The game assumes a level of comfort with judgment, although the hints vary greatly in their potential to be meanspirited. We mostly stuck to celebrities since they were figures we all knew, and this kept the game accessible, but it also limited the common ground we could establish. As with most games, I think the ability to cause harm lies in the hands of the players more than in the design of the game, since the players generate the responses.
All in all, I found the game entertaining, although I would make a few new spectrum cards, and I’d love to play with friends to draw on inside jokes and common understandings.
