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Whatever you’re looking for this holiday season, there is a game for you. Whether you want to completely annoy your friends and family, take the time to work together to complete a goal, or both at the same time, there is something out there. Here, I give you three of my favourites. Wandering Towers: a game letting you be a fantastical nuisance to your hearts’ desire, Switch and Signal: a light strategy game, testing your group’s planning and collaboration skills and Wavelength: a party game allowing you to play competitively and cooperatively, where you might be trying to help, but you may just hinder.
Naughty: Wandering Towers
Frustration is one of the best of the best competitive games on the market for allowing you to simply be a nuisance. Wandering Towers brings much the same vibes to the game table but also has a beautiful fantasy theme. In Wandering Towers, players must get all of their wizards home to the ravenskeep and fill up all of their magical potion bottles. But it is not just the wizards that wander, the towers also meander, allowing you to move multiple wizards at a time towards their destination, or even moving them past the keep so they must wander all the way around the board again. These towers can also be moved on top of the wizards, imprisoning them. This is how potion bottles are filled, although what with, the game fails to mention. Life essence, soul fragments, pee? Who knows? As wizards can be removed from view, players must remember where they all are, as once a tower is lifted, it must be moved, no checking to see where your last little guy is. This can prove extremely tricky when different portions of different towers are constantly moving this way and that! Not only can players annoy one another with moving towers, they can also pay full potion bottles to use a set selection of specific magic spells to cause even more chaos.
I have always been a big fan of frustration, there is something so joyous in screwing over your fellow players by landing on them. It feels so much more personal than just playing a card or claiming a space that they had their eye on! It was me, not the mysterious fates that control the game *cue evil laughter*. Unlike in frustration, the “home” space is moveable and I think this is a really neat addition made in Wandering Towers. There is no longer a “home stretch”, as the ravenskeep can be moved far away at a moment’s notice, and this makes for beautifully mischievous gameplay. Whilst there are restrictions on the number of potion bottles you can obtain, there are no set rules on the number of magic spells in play. The more there are to choose from, the better tailored your nuisance-making can be, especially when playing with the expansion packs, which add further possible spells to the game.
Nice: Switch and Signal
In Switch and Signal, players work together to move steam trains to collect goods from a number of cities and guide them to the port so that they can be shipped all over the world. On each turn, the active player draws a destination card which tells them which trains need to move or be deployed. The spaces moved by the trains are controlled by dice rolls, with three types: slow, medium, or fast, with different numbers on, giving a higher or lower likelihood of going further each turn. The player then uses the cards from their hand to change points, switch signals or move trains further to set up the optimal network configuration for the destination card requirements on the next go. If trains cannot complete their movement, or crash, the team loses time tokens due to the delay they’ve caused and if they lose enough time tokens, they lose a destination card, reducing the number of turns they have available to complete their mission. Players are freely allowed to communicate about strategy and their hands at all times, although only one player is allowed to play at a time. If the team gets into a real pickle, there are three helpers on the board that can be used once per game to get out of a tight spot.
This game is a very lovely strategy game that encourages everyone to get involved in planning and execution. I especially like that each player has a set hand of cards that is played with on a turn, as it requires more strategy than a singular pool of cards between all players. It also allows an element of chance to the game, as your pool is limited by the cards you pick up, which I always enjoy in a game. On a similar note, I also like that the trains are guided, not by a particular number of spaces that they move each turn, but by a distribution from the rolling of a die. It allows for both really safe planning, always thinking about the consequences of a worst case scenario, and also for risk taking strategy, because what if it rolls exactly what we want? Balancing this spectrum is a really key element of the game, and is one that makes Switch and Signal intriguing and fun. Even once a team has mastered the base game, there are a plethora of options to increase the difficulty or shake up the mechanics that are given in the rule book. For example, there are simple things like reducing the number of destination cards, or increasing the number of goods to be delivered, or there are more complex changes such as the second map, which splits the port in two, or suggestions on making deployment more tricky and variable. All of which culminates in a game that doesn’t get stale, and is extremely enjoyable to play again and again.
Chaotic: Wavelength
Wavelength can be played either in two teams, or as one big team competing for the best score. When playing competitively, the aim is to be the first team to score 10 or more points and when playing cooperatively, there is a ranking system in the rule-book by which to compare your score. Regardless of the mode of play, the main aspect of the game is the same. Each turn, the team elects a “psychic”, a person who gives the clues that the rest of the team must guess. They are given a wavelength card which gives a spectrum, for example hot to cold. The wheel is then spun and the psychic reveals to themselves where the target is, and must think of a clue that embodies that place on the spectrum. For example, the extremes of hot to cold may be the sun or deep space, but a fresh loaf of bread may be somewhere in the middle. The psychic then covers up the spinner and gives their clue. The guessers then have as much time as they like to debate the clue and the spectrum and decide where on the spinner they would like to guess. Once they have chosen, the other team then gets to decide whether they think that the target is actually to the left or right of where the guessing team has placed it. Once all decisions are made, the psychic reveals where the target was and points are scored based on how close the guessing team were.
This game can be hilarious, and works especially well as an ice breaker or the last game of the night. It prompts a lot of interesting discussions and really makes you think deeper on
topics that you maybe have never batted an eyelash at before. Whether you’d actually like that sort of in-depth knowledge on your friends’ and familys’ opinions is debatable… Whilst the rules are relatively simple to grasp, it can take some time to get to understand what sort of clues work best, and the gamemakers have come up with a nice solution to mixed-experience playing groups. If a group guesses the target 100% correctly, if they are behind the other team for points, they are allowed to have another go, thus if a team is lagging, it doesn’t mean that they’re automatically out of the running, but can claw their way back if it’s taken a while to get the hang of it. Largely to not break the game or make discussions too long, the rules state that clues can only convey a singular idea and have to be from reality (including fictional universes that are known to the group). Whilst this is great for that purpose and for helping newbies understand what’s going on, I do enjoy and recommend playing wavelength with obscenely specific made-up clues like “a frog in a top hat dancing a jig on the eiffel tower”, but I’d suggest making this a house rule that every clue must be like this, otherwise, I do agree, it breaks the game a little.