Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Easier to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
More strategic control
How it plays
How does it play?
Send abstract signals to an alien, compare the mysterious responses, and infer the hidden rules that govern communication.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Cooperative Game
Players coordinate their actions toward a shared objective and win or lose together.
Communication Limits
Rules restrict what players may say, show, or reveal while cooperating.
Pattern Recognition
Identify recurring visual, spatial, or logical arrangements.
Deduction
Combine clues and exclusions to identify hidden information.
Induction
Infer a hidden rule by comparing which examples satisfy it.
Read the full game description
Signal is a cooperative induction game about first contact. One player becomes the Alien and secretly follows a sequence of rules, while the other players arrange abstract shape tokens as signals. The Alien transforms each input into an output without explaining why. By comparing experiments, discussing patterns, and testing increasingly precise hypotheses, the human team tries to identify every hidden rule across three levels of difficulty. The sparse procedure creates a focused puzzle about evidence, communication, and the scientific method.
