Something is in the air. Unseen. Vibrating. Friscalating. Between A Message from the Stars, City of Six Moons, and Out of Sorts, it almost seems like we’re being prepared for some grand task, an entire species press-ganged into the labor of translating alien missives.

Or maybe I just really like first contact stories.

Signal, created by the design collective Jasper Beatrix, bears a singular honor. This is the best of the recent spate of games about communicating with aliens. But more than that, it’s a game I’ve delayed writing about so I could play it over and over again, reveling in its unparalleled sense of experimentation and discovery.

This guy seems like a cool hang.

It begins with the appearance of an alien.

Illustrated by Cricks Rose, the twenty-five extraterrestrial bodies included in Signal are more silhouettes than profiles. They remind me slightly of Stephen Gammell’s nightmare-inducing images from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, suggesting peristalsing appendages and inhuman trunks. Unlike Gammell’s illustrations, however, Rose’s approach is more curious than horrifying. One horned beast, furred along the edges, seems to sport ordinary legs until on closer inspection it becomes apparent that the creature’s head is also its abdomen is also its mode of conveyance. Another adorns itself with burning candles, whether decorative or natural. Yet another radiates like a glow-worm, but in such a way that suggests its gleaming outline is merely a stripe of something larger.

While an alien’s appearance offers the first glimpse into its behavior, there are clues aplenty yet to discover. By the conclusion of a ten-to-thirty-minute session, hopefully you’ll even know what some of those clues are.

Signal is a cooperative game. One player takes on the role of the alien. Everybody else, from one to however many people you can cram around a table, constitute a panel of experts. That’s right. “Experts.” In which field? How do you staff such a panel? It’s anybody’s guess. The obvious option is linguists, but there’s no reason to hold back. In our sessions, we’ve fielded translators and mathematicians and artists. My friend Adam plays the videographer, snapping still images of the panel’s experiments and recording videos of the alien’s responses. Recording is explicitly permitted by the rules, and good thing, too. Those videos have staved off misunderstandings on more than one occasion.

My very scientific experiment.

Unlike City of Six Moons, which offered the commonality of written language to fall back on, or A Message from the Stars, which saw alien and human bantering words back and forth, Signal begins where all bridges between cultures lay their actual groundwork: pointing to sticks and rocks and listening to what your opposite party has to say.

Really, that isn’t too far off. The experts have an assortment of triangles, cubes, rods, and discs in two colors at their disposal. They arrange these shapes on a fabric mat according to any logic of their choosing. Together, apart, touching, stacked, piled atop the mat’s test-pattern leylines — anything goes.

And then the alien responds. It moves shapes. It removes some and adds others. Perhaps it stacks one piece atop another. The objective, for both experts and alien alike, is to alter the experiment until it resembles a certain predetermined arrangement. Maybe three triangles next to each other. A rod atop a disc. Something like that.

One of the great strengths of playing Signal, as opposed to the (frankly dull) call-and-response exchanges of A Message from the Stars, is the stark degree of latitude entrusted to both sides of these conversations. As the panel of experts, you need to prompt the alien to create the right pattern, but you’re given total control over the starting parameters of each experiment. Those early moments are overwhelming, each experiment producing what seems like random noise, until little by little you begin to feel out the shape of the rules governing the alien’s behavior.

Speaking of which, the alien’s rules may be ironclad, but this is a melty, bendy alloy of iron. Every alien is given three separate rules. Early on, only the first rule applies. Later the second rule is added, and then the third. I won’t spoil anything, but a rule might be something like “Remove any black cubes touching a line.” Later, once the experts have successfully mastered that first edict, another is appended: “Push apart any touching triangles.” Eventually, a third rule appears: “Place a disc atop any cube not touching a rod, then remove any rods.” That sort of thing.

Auntie?

This entire process is quietly brilliant. Both sides are bound by the alien’s rules, but there’s a surprising degree of leeway in how the alien can execute them, not to mention how the experts interpret what they’ve witnessed. The result is something like conversational frisson. Even when both sides understand the gist of what the other is doing, little inconsistencies or misunderstandings tend to accumulate in the wake of each experiment.

I’ll give an example. Let’s say my alien is operating on a simple rule. “Stack a disc on top of any two touching cubes.” Easy, right?

Except you, as our resident expert, might place two cubes side by side, one black and one white, and watch me add a black disc to the top of those cubes. What should you take away from that? Maybe you will deduce the correct rule immediately. But the rule might have instead been “Cover any differently-colored pieces with a black disc.” Or, crud, even “Stack a disc on top of any other piece.” Maybe there are outside considerations. “If there is a triangle within the inner circle, place a disc on a piece outside the inner circle.”

The point I’m trying to make is that you aren’t only grappling with the rules, but with the gray areas that surround those rules, with the waffling specificities that govern how those shapes are moved, subtracted, generated, or replaced. This is where a skilled alien can do so much more than follow the rules like some program adhering to lines of code. You’re free to get creative. Are my experts stuck on the idea that two non-matching shapes make a black disc? Okay, I’ll give them a white disc instead. I’ll give them a reason to pause and reevaluate. Consistency is but one key of communication. In the right hands, inconsistency unlocks a fair few doors as well.

The alien has a few extra options for giving help.

The result is a fumbling conversation, absent any real precision or even true understanding, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. More than once, I’ve watched a team of experts “successfully” commune with their alien, only to laugh themselves silly when they heard the rules they were ostensibly interfacing with.

That might sound like a weakness, but it’s no more a problem than speaking a language without being able to fully explain its grammatical rules. That’s the beauty of this thing we call communication. It’s enough to know that certain words hit the ear right. If you hear somebody reading Red Riding Hood and immediately launch into an explanation about how ablaut reduplication is an acceptable exception to proper adjective order, everyone in your kid’s kindergarten class is going to stare at you like some bug-eyed nerd. And they would be right. You would be a bug-eyed nerd to care that much about apophony. Just let the vibes wash over you, man.

Okay, enough of that. This is the second time I’ve been deeply impressed by Jasper Beatrix. The collective’s previous title, Typeset, also produced surprising heft despite its tiny box and twenty-minute duration. Signal is even stronger than Typeset, a commendable achievement indeed. I can’t wait to see what these folks get up to next. More immediately, I can’t wait to hold another fireside chat with the rest of these aliens.

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A complimentary copy of Signal was provided by the publisher.