Triangulation by Peter C. Hayward

From recent experience at the Expo, I understand how important it is to be able to communicate the basis of your game succinctly. Triangulation has an absolutely fantastic pitch. You are trying to clue an idea to your teammates using 3 clues. BUT - the opposing team will get 2 of those clues. Can you craft your 3 clues cleverly so that your team get the message and your interceptors do not?

That’s it. That’s the game. Correctly identifying a message is worth 1 point (whether that was an interception or not). Failing to communicate a message awards the opposition a point, and first to 4 points wins.

Yes, I know, Ekolu Kapakahi would be horrified¹. You have the strong Triangulation theme. You have that the cluegivers get 3 clues to give. And yet you play to 4 points??!?

What’s worse is, if I’m reading the scoring rules correctly, should the game reach 3-3 and need to go into a 4th round, that round is something of a tiebreaker anyway, which I’ll come back to in a moment.

I don’t want to bag on AllPlay too hard here, but on the subject of the point scoring, there’s a nifty little cardboard triangle only for scoring, which is fair enough, but then there are deluxe components available… that upgrade the score markers. The least useful part of the game² is that part that gets the upgrade³.

There was one thing I failed to fully appreciate from the pitch - the opposing team get 2 chances at intercepting, firstly from one word, and then from a 2nd word. This hurt me in a way I didn’t expect - I tried to be clever, attempting to clue Sonic The Hedgehog as BLUE, EGG, MAN. I figured that BLUE + EGG was not going to lead them to Sonic, BLUE + MAN might lead to some thinking about an alien percussion group, and EGG + MAN was maybe heading into Humpty Dumpty territory.

Unfortunately for me, the first clue that they flipped over was BLUE, and with nothing else to go on they immediately guessed Sonic the Hedgehog as a Hail Mary and won the point. Damn.

In a different round we revealed SNOW and went for Frozen, thinking of the Disney movie. Then we revealed GIRL and faced a quandary - either we were right on the Frozen front and we actually needed to guess Elsa or Anna, or we were wrong and needed something else. On the basis that SNOW GIRL was a bit on the button for one of the Frozen characters, someone had the great idea to wonder out loud what the missing 3rd clue might be and we got a successful interception. Spoilers⁴.

There’s a trend of games out there, be they to do with words or pictures, but they can broadly be summed up like this: Someone gives a clue to a thing, and they need to hit the Goldilocks zone with that clue. Too easy and they get punished in some way, Too hard and they get punished in a different way, you have to aim for Just Right.

Off the top of my head, this unofficial series includes:

I did recently play a round of Codenames with a Spymaster that just wouldn’t push the boundary of their words. They very much struggled to give clues that weren’t 1s (i.e. their clue only referenced one word in the grid) but I think it’s because they are, in general, a very accurate person with high attention to detail. Stretching a clue to potentially fit a second word was difficult for them, because for example if AMERICA and FRANCE were words on the table, they wouldn’t want to say “Country, 2” because the country is called USA, and so their clue wouldn’t be correct, despite my feelings that the majority of people would know what you meant and go with it. I’ve also experienced the flip side, where “Da Vinci” was given as a clue for I think ANGEL, because I was supposed to understand that Da Vinci was a clue for Da Vinci’s Code, which includes angels. Unfortunately, CODE itself was also in the grid, and was the assassin,

That is to say that, for a whole host of reasons, cluegiving is hard. Nat’s opinion on why Just One is the GOAT lies in their flipping of the landscape - instead of one cluegiver giving clues to their team, everyone is a clue giver, and the specialized role is the guesser. Somehow there’s a lot less pressure on you when you’re guessing, despite the fact that the success of the round lies entirely on you, because it’s just an easier job than clue giving. In Just One, with everyone giving a clue, it’s OK if someone at the table just can’t find a good clue.

Triangulation does do one thing very well here to alleviate the clue giving pressure - as we’re split into two teams to play, there are two cluegivers at any one time. Whilst both cluegivers are thinking there’s nothing for anyone else to do, and that’s where the social nature of the game comes in, you can be debriefing the previous round or discussing the Eurovision Song Contest whilst you wait.

But as soon as one cluegiver has come up with their Holy Trinity everyone’s in play working out what the message is - giving the other clue giver time to come up with their clue set. That time without everybody watching you and waiting for your input is crucial for reducing the anxiety of giving clues for some people.

Unfortunately, that is spoiled by that tie-breaking 4th round that I mentioned. Should the score reach 3-3, in the 4th round the fastest cluegiver gets to play their round - if the opposing team intercepts (or if the OG team don’t understand the message) they get their 4th point and win immediately, and if the cluegiver’s team do understand the message then they get their 4th point and win immediately. The second cluegiver just doesn’t get a chance to give their clues.

That is, of course, if you are playing by the rules as written. I didn’t tell anyone about that rule when we played, the scores reached 4-4, and we called it a well deserved draw of a fun game.

This one’s a difficult call. I think Triangulation is about the same difficulty level as Codenames. Being the Spymaster in Codenames or the clue giver here feels roughly the same difficulty and pressure. You might want a timer to stop the intercepting team taking forever to decide which guess to go for. You might want to use the optional rule where you tell the teams what category your word is from, which can definitely help clear up ‘character’ versus ‘brand’ confusion.

Triangulation definitely tested my word skills in a way that’s not been tested before, and I loved the experience. I have to agree with the back of the box here - the publishers categorize this as a Thinky Party game and, despite not having heard the term before, I have to agree.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, we’d appreciate it if you would forward it to a friend. If you are that friend, welcome!