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If you haven’t touched a board game since Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders, you might have missed out on the board game boom that’s been brewing for over a decade. CMYK’s Wavelength, released in 2019, was primed for the pandemic era, but its continued popularity is owed to its easy-to-learn rules, great replay value, and playability in groups of various sizes. And of course, social media had something to do with it.
Wavelength started gaining popularity on TikTok last year, but reemerged this year as a trend. According to the official rules, players are divided into two teams of up to 20 players. One team’s “psychic,” or clue giver, randomly spins a dial, revealing a target range between two opposite ideas, which can be something like “hot to cold” or “boring hobby to interesting hobby.” They then have to give a clue that falls in that range on a spectrum.
The guessers then discuss where to turn the dial to, with points awarded based on proximity. The challenge, then, is often to find something that’s a kind of boring hobby, for example. A lot of the fun comes from figuring out how your friends think about things.
Wavelength’s popularity is part of a broader board game trend that has propelled the industry, including clever party games like Codenames and nature-inspired games like Wingspan. Those are just the bestsellers — there are a lot of offbeat indie games out there, too.
The TikTok trend, a simplified version inspired by the game, often omits the actual game board, with players instead making guesses on a range of 1-10. But the board game, with its prewritten prompts and fun tactile elements, spurred the trend, and is still popular on TikTok in its own right.
Social media or not, it has also become one of the most acclaimed party games, picking up awards and accolades from board game reviewers. Wherever it falls on the spectrum of “trendy” to “not trendy,” Wavelength has proven to be a game with staying power.
Wavelength Party Game – A Mind Reading Party Game
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