Signal Game Review

SIGNAL GAME REVIEW

 Signal is a quiet, cooperative brainteaser, a meditation on communication that is nowhere near as valuable as the phrase “meditation on communication” might suggest. Players work together to communicate with an alien, represented by a vivid black-and-white illustration on a card and embodied by a lone, silent player. The Terrans send signals: black-and-white rods, cubes, circles, and triangles arranged on a cloth board. Much of the game time is spent arranging these signals.

 When the signal is ready, the alien responds by changing it. Maybe he/she/they move some pieces or remove some. They might create a stack or swap pieces. It could be, and often is, some combination of things. The hope is that the alien will send back exactly the signal that is shown on the front of his card. Nothing more, nothing less.

 Whatever the alien does, he follows the rules written on the back of his card. For example, “Place a black rod on a black disk” or “Remove two rods and place another piece between them.” If the first round of communication is successful within ten attempts, everyone moves on to the second round. The goal remains the same, but an additional set of rules is added, which are followed after the first set of rules. A third round awaits you on the other side of the second, if you solve it.

 Trying to crack an alien's code is incredibly fun, especially when your efforts are barely reaching the goal. The rules themselves are never fancy. Instead, they're designed to interact in clever ways. The second-round rule forces you to take a step back and think differently about the first-round rule. I don't really like playing games that involve blind, failed guesses, and I enjoyed my first time giving up the role of an alien in Signal. I miss a future where I won't be able to do that anymore, since you can't play against the same alien more than once, and you can never do that with the alien you've embodied.

 There's always the fear in games like this that being the oddball is going to be thankless. You sit there in silence while everyone else talks, then perform a transformation algorithm while they watch. It sounds uninteresting. Fortunately, while the role of the oddball won't appeal to everyone, Signal avoids that problem. The instructions leave room for creativity, for stubbornly insisting that you can do it. There's also room for thinking hard. If your teammates are stuck on a certain step in the instructions, if they keep making the same mistake, you can try to do it in a way that might make a difference.

 There is something anthropological about being an outsider. I observe people with joy and fascination. Because the game allows for real exploration, you learn something about people as individuals and people in general through the way they play. Some people do it without hesitation. One friend made his first guess by gathering a few figures, shaking them in his hand, and then laying them out on a cloth, ready to read the dice. Another friend was absolutely certain every time that this rule had something to do with symmetry. Groups and individuals became fixated on ephemeral things, interpreting noise as a signal.

 Sometimes following the noise really works. “It only removes the parts it sees from above,” when the real reason is both unrelated and mutually exclusive. This relative lack of precision—I promise, aliens are pretty picky—may irritate puzzle fans, but it speaks to the larger point of this wonderful exercise. The goal of Signal isn’t to spell out the rules or fully understand why what you’re doing works. The goal is to communicate successfully. Communication is imperfect. You can’t always say exactly what you want or mean. That doesn’t mean you can’t get along.