Forecast

Based on the game Wavelength by Alex Hague, Justin Vickers, and Wolfgang Warsch

A cooperative party game that starts some great conversations.

Setup

1. Take the 0-X cards for one suit (doesn’t matter which) and set them aside. This stack is the thermometer.
2. Take all other cards in all suits (110 cards) and shuffle them together. This stack is the weather.
3. Nominate one player to be the Oracle. This player holds on to the list of prompts (below) for the duration of the game.
4. Nominate another player to be the Atmosphere. This player holds on to the weather stack for the duration of the game.
5. Choose a starting player (it’s fine if that player also happens to be the Oracle or the Atmosphere). Give that player the thermometer stack. They are now the clue giver.

Gameplay

On a given turn:

1. The Atmosphere shuffles the weather stack and draws a single card, announcing that card’s serial number in the deck (e.g, 97). They then place it on the table, gradually building up a grid. The grid is our turn tracker — it has one card per turn, with one row being a full round around the table. When the Atmosphere places the final card in the third row, the game is over.
2. The Oracle finds the corresponding prompt in the list of prompts (for 97, this would be “A store you go to all the time / A store you rarely go to”). The Oracle reads the prompt out loud.
3. The prompt is a scale. The first part of the prompt corresponds to 0, and the second part is X (10).
4. The clue giver shuffles the thermometer stack and draws a card out, secretly looking at it (not sharing the number with the other player(s)). They look at the card’s rank within the suit (0-X), not its serial number in the deck. For our example, they draw a 3.
5. The clue: The clue giver must now provide a short clue that lands at a 3 in the scale of “A store you go to all the time / A store you rarely go to”. So, closer to a store you go to all the time, but not all the way to that end of the scale. The clue giver chooses to say something like “Costco”.
6. The guess: The other player(s) must now guess a number from 0-X. If there are multiple other players, they can engage in a lively discussion. Half the fun is the conversation here — but the clue giver must remain utterly silent. They already gave their clue, that’s it— the rest is up to the group.

After pondering and/or discussing things, the group makes a guess. In our example, they guess 5. 7. Making it rain (scoring the guess): If the guess is right on (e.g., 3 in our case), it’s worth 3 points. If it’s 1 away (2 or 4 in our case), it’s worth 2 points. If it’s 2 away, it’s worth 1 point. If farther off, it’s worth nothing at all.

Once you determine how many points the guess is worth, track that score by making the weather stack “rain”: Drop a matching number of cards from that stack, and set them aside to keep score for later. In our case, the group gained 1 point, so we would remove just one card from the weather stack and set it aside for scoring later. Yes, this reduces the size of the weather stack (making fewer prompts available) but it’s not a problem in a typical game. 8. A new clue giver: The thermometer stack is now handed to the next player, who will be the clue giver on the next turn.

Scoring

Each player gets to be clue giver for a total of 3 turns (not consecutively— you switch clue givers after every guess as described above).

Then, the group counts how many cards they made “rain” to figure out their points total for the game, dividing that total by the number of players to determine a score.

• 0: Did you actually play the game?
• 1-3: Okay.
• 3-6: Good.
• Over 6: Awesome!

Prompts