Surfing is not just a sport, but a culture. Personally, I’ve seen far too many shark movies to want to go hang out close to shore doing something that apparently resembles one of the sharks’ favorite meals, but now thanks to The Op’s great new game The Perfect Wave, I can enjoy a slice of the surfing lifestyle while staying safely away from the ocean and those row upon row of razor sharp teeth.
What Is The Perfect Wave?
The Perfect Wave is a game for 2-4 players, ages 8 and up, and takes about 45 minutes to play. It’s currently available from The Op’s website, Amazon, and your friendly local game store.
Note: I may earn a commission from purchases linked from this review.
The Perfect Wave was designed by Jason Mowery and Chase Williams and published by The Op, with illustrations by Patrick Spaziante.
The Perfect Wave Components
Inside the box, you’ll find:
- 1 pier board
- 4 player boards
- 72 wave cards
- 72 maneuver cards
- 30 goal cards
- 4 player aid cards
- 4 surfer tokens
- 12 wax tokens
- 2 surfboard tokens
- 1 first player standee
All of the components are of the quality you’d expect from a finished game from an established publisher like The Op.
The pier and player boards are heavy cardboard, with nicely thematic artwork. The player boards look nice out of the box, but you don’t fully appreciate how well they work with the theme of the game until you start playing and placing cards on them. The wave cards all have the horizon half way on the card, and the boards match this look, so when you have a bunch of wave cards, the board serves to complete the artwork in the spaces between cards.
The wave cards themselves are poker sized, plastic-coated cards that are easy to play with. Each features a wave of varying sizes on the front, with a nice bold number to match, making them very easy to see and work with.
The maneuver deck is made up of trick cards and paddle out cards. The trick cards need to fit quite a lot of information on them, and in that they succeed. There’s nice big text at the bottom with the name of the card, and smaller but still easily read text above that. As they are played in the game, the cards are designed to go above the player board face down, and the artwork on the backs of the card nicely continue the art from the board, again making everything fit together beautifully.
The goal cards are likewise plastic-coated poker-sized cards with clear text.
The remaining cardboard components are the same heavy board as the boards. The surfer tokens are all double-sided, so while what your surfer looks like doesn’t impact the gameplay at all, you get a little choice in what they look like.
The wax tokens mimic the look of a can of the wax surfers use on their boards.
The surfboard tokens almost make me want to go out and buy a board (until you see how much surfboards really cost.)
I’m not entirely sure why the first player token is a standee, but it’s neat anyway.
How to Play The Perfect Wave
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to put together, well, the perfect wave. Over the course of the game, you’ll draw and play wave cards that you need to place in a particular order on your player board. Once the game ends, you’ll reveal the cards. Whoever has the biggest, longest wave and performs the most tubular tricks wins.
Setup
Each player takes a player board, a player aid card, 2 wax tokens, and a surfer token. The surfer is placed under the left-most space on the player board. Make sure there’s room above the board to place cards.
Place the pier board in the middle of the table. The remaining wax tokens are placed nearby.
First, separate the trick cards from the paddle out cards. The trick cards are shuffled, and a number of cards are then removed from the game based on the number of players. In a 2-player game, 24 trick and 12 paddle out cards are removed. For three players, it’s 12 trick and 6 paddle out cards. All cards are used in a 4-player game. Then, each player is dealt 2 trick cards. After that, the trick and paddle out cards are shuffled together and placed to the left of the top row on the pier board.
All of the wave cards are shuffled together. Each player is dealt 2, and the remaining cards are placed to the left of the lower row on the pier board.
Next, the goal cards are shuffled, and 2 are deal to each player. 4 more are then dealt to the middle of the table, face up. The rest of the goal cards are returned to the box. The surfboard tokens are placed near the face up goals and become public goals.
Players may now look at all of their cards. They then choose one goal card to keep (but not reveal) and return the other to the box.
The top four cards are dealt face up from each of the two decks on the pier board and placed on their respective spaces on the board.
The player who most recently visited a beach goes first.
Gameplay
On your turn, you have two action points you can spend. You can perform one 2-point action or two 1-point actions, including the same action twice. There are also some zero-point actions you can do at any point on your turn. Unspent action points are wasted and may not be saved for future turns.
The 1-point actions are:
- Take a wave card from the pier or the top of the deck into your hand.
- Take a wave card from the pier or the top of the deck and immediately play it to your player board.
- Take a maneuver card from the pier or the top of the deck into your hand.
- Take a maneuver card from the pier or the top of the deck and immediately play it. How you play it depends on if it’s a paddle out or a trick card; see below for details.
- Play a wave card from your hand to your player board.
- Play a paddle out card from your hand.
- Discard a wax token to move your surfer.
- Discard a wax token to take a wave card from the discard pile. You either play the card immediately or add it to your hand.
There are two 2-point actions:
- Activate one of the four public goals.
- Gain a wax token from the supply.
The free action you can take at any time during your turn is to discard a wax token and then discard all of the face-up wave cards and draw four new face-up cards. You can only do this for the wave cards, not the maneuver cards.
Playing wave and trick cards
When you take any of the above actions to play a wave card, you play it face down on your player board. Trick cards are played face-down above your board.
Either type of card can only be played in an empty space to the right of your surfer. So, as your surfer paddles out, you have fewer spaces in which to play, and you must carefully balance the need to play cards with the need to get the surfer as far out as possible.
Once a card is played, it can never be moved. You can peek at your cards at any time, but should always keep them secret from other players.
When playing wave cards, you are trying to create the titular perfect wave. When the cards are eventually revealed during scoring, waves will only score from the point where the surfer is and to its left. Additionally, wave cards only score if each card is greater than or equal to the value of the card to its left. At a basic level, you’re trying to create a wave that starts at a high number (the cards are numbered 1-12) and ends on a low number. However, you can also score for sets (three or more adjacent cards of the same number) and runs (three or more adjacent cards of consecutive numbers.) Any empty spot on the board ends a wave, and only one wave will score per board.
Trick cards are played above the board. They must be played above the spot where the surfer is or to their right. If the trick card is above a wave card in a scoring wave and if its conditions are met, it will score. Note that there is no requirement that a trick card be placed above a wave card, but if the wave space is still empty at the end of the game, the trick card will not score.
Paddling out
Your wave will start at the card above the surfer and work from there to the left, so the further out your surfer goes, the longer the wave can score. However, wave and trick cards can only be played above and to the right of the surfer, so the further out the surfer gets, the less room you have to play cards.
You can move your surfer by playing a paddle out card, either from your hand or from the maneuver deck. You can also discard a wax token to move your surfer.
The surfer only ever moves to the right.
Public and private goals
During setup, you’re dealt two goal cards and choose to keep one. If you meet the requirements of the goal by game’s end, you’ll score the indicated points. Obviously, this goal card can help drive your strategy.
There are also four public goal cards on the table. Any player may choose to activate a public goal, but it takes their entire turn as it is a two-point action. The player activating the goal places a surfboard token on it, There are four goals, but only two may be activated as there are only two surfboard tokens.
At the end of the game, any player who met the requirements for any activated goal gets those points, regardless of who activated the goal. Unactivated goals do not score. Private goals will always score for their player so long as the conditions are met; they do not need to be activated.
End-of-turn cleanup
At the end of each player’s turn, the right-most maneuver and wave cards (if they were not taken) are “washed out to sea” and discarded.
Then, all of the other cards are shifted one space to the right to fill any gaps. The order of the cards is never changed. A new card is then drawn from the top of each deck and placed in the left-most space.
New cards are only added at the end of a player’s turn.
If the wave deck is depleted, the discard pile is shuffled and becomes the draw pile.
If the last maneuver card is drawn, the discard pile can be shuffled and become the draw pile, but doing so triggers the final round.
Game End
The game ends when the last maneuver card is drawn from the deck. Once all players have had an equal number of turns, scoring begins.
Scoring
All players begin by discarding any trick cards that are not above a wave card, and any wave and trick cards that are to the right of the surfer.
Waves
Starting with the first player, each player scores their wave.
First, if the surfer is below a space without a wave card, they must be moved to the left until they reach the wave.
Second, starting from the surfer’s location, reveal each wave card one at a time, moving to the left. Continue doing this until one of the following happens:
- A wave card is revealed that is not less than or equal to the one before it. This is a wipe-out and ends the wave. The higher card, and all wave and trick cards to the left of it, are discarded.
- A empty wave spot is reached. This also ends the wave. All wave and trick cards to the left of this spot are discarded.
- The left edge of the board is reached.
Points are scored based on the number below each spot with a wave card.
Sets and runs
If a wave contains one or more sets–three or more adjacent cards of the same number–the player receives bonus points. For each 3 card set, they get 30 points, 50 points for each 4-card set, 80 for each 5-card set, and 120 for each 6-card set.
A run is a set of 3 or more adjacent cards of consecutive values. For each 3-card run, score 20 points; for each 4-card run, score 30; for each 5-card run score 50; and for each 6-card run, score 80.
It’s possible to have multiple sets and runs in a single wave. They all score individually. It’s also possible for a single card to be part of both a set and a run, which is fine.
Tricks
Next, each player reveals the trick cards that are above wave cards. If the conditions of the trick are met, it scores.
“Snap” trick cards award points for having the most of those, so only one player can score those points. If two or more players tie, no one scores.
Goals
Each player reveals their private goal card. If they met the conditions, they score the points.
If public goal cards were activated, all players who met the requirements score.
Final score
Players add up their points from all of the above. The winner is the player with the most points.
If there’s a tie, the player with the highest-numbered card in their wave wins. If there’s still a tie, the tied player with the second-highest card in their wave wins, and so forth. Wicked.
The Perfect Wave is a 2023 Game of the Year Finalist!
Why You Should Play The Perfect Wave
One of my favorite discoveries is a game that looks pretty simple, is quick to teach and learn, but then turns out to have deep hidden layers of strategy. The Perfect Wave is exactly that kind of game.
The rules are pretty straightforward: draw a card, play a card. When you play a card, you need to play it in order so that the cards on your board count up (although pairing them and skipping numbers are both allowed, making that process easy to grasp.) And at least some of the time, you need to invest a portion of your turn to move your surfer.
But once you get into the game, you discover quickly that there is so much more to it. Like so many other well-designed games, the two-actions-per-turn at first seems like you’ll have more than enough to do each turn, making even the two-action options seem good. But then you keep running into turns where you wish you could just somehow have one more action. You really need that card on the pier, but you have these two cards in your hand you’d like to play, but oh you’re also running out of time and you really, really need to paddle out your surfer.
And then there are the tricks. In out first game, I mostly ignored these, focusing instead on constructing a really gnarly wave. My son (who, it should be mentioned, is almost always better at seeing these things before I do) took an almost opposite approach, playing only enough wave cards to get the tricks he wanted. And he absolutely killed the rest of us when it came to scoring.
And what about those goals? Like many games with hidden goals, you can probably figure out everyone’s hidden goals if you pay attention to what they seem to be drawing, but you have to balance the points you may get from achieving the goal with the points you might end up with by ignoring the goal and just focusing on tricks and the wave. (I also made this mistake in our first game, focusing so much on a wave that met my goal that I kind of ignored a lot of higher-point possibilities.) But there are also the public goals. Is it worth it to spend a whole turn activating one when you aren’t absolutely guaranteed that you’ll get the points at all, and if you do, one or more of your opponents might as well?
When you start the game, it seems like it might be a long one–that stack of wave cards looks huge on the table. But with one or more of them being picked up by players almost every turn, plus the fact that one is almost always going to “wash out” at the end of every turn, means you have far fewer turns than you think you do. And you have to use those turns so wisely, or else you’ll end up wasting a big part of your wave because your surfer didn’t get out far enough, or you won’t have time to build what you need for your goal, or you’ll end up with a hand full of cards you just didn’t have time to play.
There’s so much strategy packed into The Perfect Wave that you’ll be surprised just how fast-paced it is. Those two actions are limiting, but almost pretty much eliminate analysis paralysis, because there aren’t that many options available in the first place. And for a game with only indirect player interaction, it deftly avoids feeling like “multiplayer solitaire” as well. You probably won’t have enough spare actions to do things like hate-drafting, but you’re definitely going to be paying attention to your opponents’ boards to see how they’re doing on their waves, how many tricks they may be playing, and trying to guess their hidden goal. And of course you’ll need some kind of awareness of what they’re doing if you are planning to activate a public goal. Many of the goals also only score when compared to other players’ waves.
All in all, The Perfect Wave finds that sweet spot between the kind of fast and fun game that will be welcome at any game night and the kind of intense strategy your more dedicated gaming friends are looking for.
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
