Dropout and I are on the same Wavelength
At the end of this email, I announce that I'm doing a show featuring Rekha Shankar
I don’t talk a lot about (non-RPG) tabletop games in this space, which is weird because my career in tabletop games brought me into RPGs in the first place (just like my former career in comics brought me into tabletop games, and we all know I talk about comics a ton). I want to take some time today to cover one of my very favorite tabletop games, Wavelength, and the way it’s weaved in and out of my professional life.
To set the stage, here’s a description of the game from the publisher’s page:
Wavelength is a social guessing game where two teams compete to read each other's minds. It’s a thrilling experience of TALKING, DEEP THOUGHTS, and HIGH FIVES that anyone can play—but it also has some of that deep word game sorcery, like Codenames, where your decisions feel tense, strategic, meaningful.
For a great example of the above description in action, you need only watch the video on the 2019 Kickstarter page for the game.
And… wait… who is that handsome man at the 14 second mark? Enhance… enhance…
(Some portion of you probably don’t actually know what I look like, so I’ll just go ahead and say that’s me!!)
Around the time this video was shot, I was in a monthly gaming group with one of the game’s designers, Justin Vickers. I was, in fact, one of the first people outside the design team to playtest Wavelength at all, using index cards and hair clips as components. From the jump, I loved this game; it was so fully up my alley as a tabletop experience that a large group could enjoy but also one that had real depth and skill behind it, with explosive wins that felt like they came from a show like Match Game or something. In fact, my most immediate feedback to Justin was that Wavelength was so fun, breezy, and full of rich human interaction that it would really sing as a game show. In 2019, I even hosted a game show-styled version of Wavelength as my birthday party. Let it never be said that my birthday parties do not rule.
Wavelength was especially interesting to me because, from the summer of 2017 to the beginning of 2020, I was on a hunt for great tabletop games. This was the period when I was working on creating the games program for the Chicago Board Game Cafe, something I’ve written about before on this Substack.
One of the more unique programs we came up with was something called “Games on Tap.” These would be a rotating half-dozen or so games that our staff of teachers would recommend and be ready to teach to any table, like a wine pairing but for play. We felt this was a strong way to offer an intentionally curated experience that combatted the analysis paralysis that was an easy trap for patrons of a lot of game cafes — what the heck am I supposed to play here?! We wanted to make it easy for non-Gamers to have a good time with as few barriers as possible.
At their core, a Game on Tap had to satisfy these four criteria:
Works for a range between 2-6 players (as our largest standard dining table was a 6-top)
45 minute max playtime (both to not overwhelm casual players and to help with table turns)
5 minutes max to teach (maybe some day I’ll share my game teaching philosophy — it’s good!)
in stock at our retail store (to grab the upsell after the meal — this worked!)
And, yeah, a lot of those points above were motivated by economics, but they also produced positive results for our guests. Of course, most of the staff of CBGC were also Gamers, and so, once we had the service-oriented skeleton for what made a good Game on Tap, we also spent time diving into the ludic aspect of it.
Above was an initial sample spread we cooked up for our Games on Tap program, slotting titles into a matrix (or, as the document puts it, a sudoku board) to try to cover as many bases as possible in just a few titles. You can quibble with some of these classifications, and this was just a work in progress, but I think you see what we were going for.
To help with the above project, I spent two and a half years voraciously employing both work and free time to play as many board games as possible to help generate this document — we needed to find games that were accessible, breezy but deep, and fun. You’ll notice that Wavelength is right there on the top of this page, and indeed, it made it into our first assortment of on-tap offerings, as you can see by this custom menu we made for our teachers’ use (we wrote our own descriptions of the games to try to offer a compelling narrative hook for our guests, as you might for a food or beverage menu offering):
Aw, heck, cuz I like you so much, here was the whole first Games on Tap menu, if you’re interested:
Of course, if you know anything about how this story goes, or even if you just clocked the timing I was talking about above, you might have deduced that we only ever got to showcase one rotation of these Games on Tap, because COVID was a real motherfucker.
The Chicago Board Game Cafe had its grand opening on February 14, 2020. (I also had a Mortified show that night, and a very understanding girlfriend at the time. Sorry, Katie!!) Governor JB Pritzker (aka the Great Khan) rightly shut Illinois down on March 14, 2020. We got 30 days of service. The third of four Saturdays we had was banging. Our budget counted on, I believe, 120 covers in a night, and we had something like 370. Wild. Our concept was working; we were crushing. Do you know how many people were playing Wavelength that night?? Only a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic could stop us.
That Sunday was a naturally slower day, and without the wild turn of the Saturday before, I think the sober realities of what was coming set in a little more. I remember the restaurant was mostly dead by 9:30, so I was taking some time to sit and unpack with my teaching staff (a true gang of all-stars) when I saw someone wander into our retail space across the restaurant. I must admit I was somewhat annoyed at first — like, dang, man, we’re trying to close here. But I went into the store to try to be helpful because that was my job. The gentleman, who looked somewhat familiar to me, had a copy of Pandemic in his hand, which I thought was really funny. “Kind of makes you feel like you have some control over what’s about to happen, right?” I said to him. He laughed. “Yeah, for real.” He bought the game from me, and as our POS system was printing out his credit card receipt, I noticed the space for his signature read “Adejuyigbe, D”. I did a double-take at the guy, and sure enough.
“Oh my god — you’re Demi Adejuyigbe! I just heard you on Comedy Bang Bang. I love your ‘September’ videos! Can I please get a picture with you?”
(It turns out Demi was in town for a taping of Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and Peter Sagal brought him to our restaurant after. And, by the way, if you haven’t seen Demi’s series of “September” videos, you simply must.)
You better believe I repost this picture on my Facebook every 21st of September. I remember.
Last summer, in the throes of searching for something to lift my spirits following a tough breakup, I subscribed to Dropout. I was already familiar with so many of its performers thanks to the aforementioned Comedy Bang Bang, and it seemed like a pleasant thing to binge while I tried to get my groove back. I think I jammed through like eight different shows on the platform last year, and I’ve written before about how my favorite was one called Smartypants, which is basically absurd TED talks delivered by really funny people. Here’s the poster for season 1 of the show:
You might notice the gentleman in the 1:00 position is the same as the dude in my picture above. That’s Demi Adejuyigbe, who (of interest to readers of this publication, I’m sure) gives a presentation on which cartoon characters are invited to The Cookout:
I’ve become a fiend for most Dropout programs since then, but my interest was especially piqued when the platform announced a new tabletop game show called Parlor Room, which would feature host Becca Scott playing some of her guests’ favorite board games on camera. Wouldn’t you know it, the first episode of Parlor Room features some of the Dropout gang, including Mr. Adejuyigbe, playing through a session of Wavelength.
With the understanding that Dropout is (said with all love) sort of an engine of parasociality, it made me feel weirdly validated to see some of my favorite performers play Wavelength for laughs on TV, and to have it be fuckin rad. What I told Justin Vickers the first time I played was right — Wavelength would make a great game show. To have such a killer ensemble of comedians illustrating that fact was just some extra sauce. In this, Dropout and I were aligned.
The Wavelength episode of Parlor Room isn’t the only resonance with Dropout I’ve got going on right now, though. And this other one’s a little less parasocial. [This section is a plug.]
Through the magic of me making a big ask at the right time, Rekha Shankar — the host of the aforementioned Smartypants, in the middle of that poster up there — will be performing on the next Mortified Chicago show, on June 13 at the Athenaeum Center. She’s joining an incredible lineup of personalities that includes local artists, a Fringe Festival performer and narrative architect, an actor-turned-mental health professional, and one of the show’s own producers. I’ve never been this excited for a Mortified lineup, and if you’re local to Chicago, I really think you may want to get tickets for this soon, because the show’s going to rule, and it will almost certainly sell out.
And if you’re not in Chicago, you can still enjoy fine Dropout entertainment from wherever you are, and there might be a different Mortified live show coming to a place near you soon as well! It’s an especially great time to support independent art right now. It’s also a great time to carve out some space for play, if you’re able. May I interest you in a game of Wavelength?
This was an outstanding letter. Hell yeah
Been a subscriber of Dropout since 2022, so stoked for Rehka to be a part of your show !