What the Nose Knows: How a Neuroscience-Inspired Game Makes Scents

What do board games, neuroscience, brain hacking, and common scents have in common?

All are core to the board game WHIFF.

The gaming world is often dominated by visuals, whether electronic or analog. At the Festival International des Jeux, I was able to test some games which break this mould. At the Nuits du Off, I was fortunate enough to bump into Dr Alice Drew and Dr Alice Vidal and test out their prototype party game, WHIFF.

The premise of WHIFF is simple. There are a number of vials on a beautifully crafted wooden turntable, each containing a different aroma. The actual smell is written inside the cap of each. To take your turn you select one of these, insert it into a wooden holder with a bulb, and choose your level of difficulty. There are three choices:

• easy - the color will match the scent

• medium - the color will not match the scent

• hard - the color may or may not match the scent

  
  

Once a difficulty is chosen, another player checks the answer and inserts a color filter before turning on the light. The main player then takes the wooden holder and takes a good whiff.

If this sounds too easy, you haven't tried it. It's based on solid research on how much of our sense of smell is based on visual information (as is our sense of taste). At one point, I managed to somehow get fixated on yellow being banana, so everything with a yellow light smelled like a banana. I did best with truffle and a red light, but only because garlic wasn't an option (I don't know why truffle with a red sensory input was garlic, and science has yet to provide a better answer than that humans aren't good at segregating sensory inputs).

After trying the game, I arranged an interview the next day to ask more.

How It All Began

The first whiff of the concept came about while Drew and Vidal were finishing their neuroscience PhDs and followed their noses into the puzzle of how the brain integrates senses. Both already had a personal interest in the world of flavors and smells, and realized that they (and everyone else) were not good at identifying different smells isolated from context, so they started looking into challenging their senses.

Around the same time, people were losing their sense of smell to COVID-19 infections, and the impact of this on quality of life was becoming more obvious.

While other games do exist using smells (there's a short list of a few different ones at the end of this article), Whiff deliberately creates a mismatch between visual and olfactory inputs, and people often depend on the visual cue (the writer can attest to this - since playing this game everything yellow brings back the scent of banana).

As well as appearing this year at Cannes, WHIFF also featured as a finalist in the DAU Festival in Barcelona. Showing its scientific roots, it’s also been seen at the Barcelona Science Festival in 2024.

The Future?

While the concept is simple, this is a game I can easily see making its way into homes for families and parties - throughout the playtest, there was a lot of discussion and laughter about the different scents and perceptions. Not only does it create a scent of competition, but it also helps explore and understand one of our senses which is simultaneously one of the most impactful and most overlooked. The inclusion of conflicting visual input may sound like it would have limited impact, but the effect has to be seen (and smelled) to be believed.

Drs Drew and Vidal have also created workshops for corporate events and delivered them at a business school. Another is scheduled to be delivered to an architecture design firm, to help develop an appreciation of how our senses are integrated and how different designs can affect both smell and, as a result, taste and wider experience.

While WHIFF is still published directly by the creators to order, Drs Drew and Vidal are speaking with publishers and distributors. The board itself, and the scent holder, are beautifully made of recycled wood by Roy Wolff and would fit in perfectly on a dining table after a meal (or before, if you'd prefer not to contaminate your senses before playing).

The Science

So, what’s it all based on?

The Drs’ PhDs in neuroscience give the game away here. There have been a number of experiments over the years which establish how much we depend on the integration of our senses to process inputs, rather than treating each in isolation. Scent and sight are particularly linked, and it’s been demonstrated time and time again with everything from Brochet’s oenology-busting red/white wine experiments to Pepsi in Coca-Cola glasses (or Coca-Cola in Pepsi glasses) to blue steak that sight and smell have strong, sometimes unpredictable interactions.

This opens up possibilities that go far beyond the obvious culinary and mixologist applications. It doesn’t go as far as lending weight to some of the more outlandish aromatherapist claims, but there is a comfortable middle ground where we can see the positive effects of designing environments to leverage multiple senses and their interactions.

Other Olfactory Games

You can get WHIFF directly from the website, soon to be updated with pricing and design options. To scratch the nasal itch, there are a number of other games that use scents as a core part of gameplay if you want to expand your olfactory palette.

SentoSphere

SentoSphere does a series of sensory-based games, from family-oriented to more specialized. They are based in France, but many of their games are available worldwide.

Bacchanales is, as the box art and name suggest, based on wine tasting. Playable by up to 7 people (more if you work in pairs), players bring along a bottle of wine each to taste (or rather for other players to taste) and score points based on identifying the different properties of the wine. The game includes a thorough guide to help players identify the different markers, and on average, first-time players get three out of five right.

Voyage Olfactif is another party-style game using scents, but instead of trying to deceive the senses, it relies on identifying them along with different properties. A dozen images are laid out around the board and each player is secretly given one to try and communicate to the other players. They do this using one to three scents, which they can use to describe the scenes in different ways - whether the color is relevant, the smell is present in the scene, whether it’s got an abstract connection, and so on.

I tested Voyage Olfactif at the festival, and not only recommended it but highly recommended a suggestion by one of SentoSphere’s representatives which was to try it with personal photos instead of the stock ones provided as a family game.

Cortex Challenge

With less of a focus on scent, Cortex Challenge is a fast and light puzzle game that plays with different modes, including smell and touch challenges along with mazes, duplicates, and others. While it’s less scent-centered than the others, the scratch and sniff cards do add an extra dimension to the gameplay.