Overview
I was really excited to try Codenames because I enjoy word games and the description of a party game that appeals to gamers sounded very promising. Plus it’s been a big hit climbing crazily through the BGG rankings; it’s now the #1 ranked party game and #33 overall. We were so eager to get our hands on a copy that we ended up pre-ordering from two different vendors just to be on the safe side, and the second copy has now found a happy home with my sister after seeing a lot of play at Thanksgiving.
The rules are so straightforward that you can practically learn the game from the back of the box:
Photo by <PERSON>
There’s a 5x5 grid of words, of which 8 or 9 are secretly assigned to each of the two teams (red or blue). One of the cards also represents the assassin, who will kill you if you approach him. The rest of the cards represent innocent bystanders. The goal of the game is to identify all 8 or 9 of your cards (agents) before the other team identifies theirs. If you accidentally guess the assassin, you lose.
Each team has a Spymaster who knows the real identities of all the people: their own agents, the other team’s, the assassin, and the innocent bystanders. These identities are represented by a card drawn at random from a deck for each game:
Photo by aleacarv
To help their teams identify their agents, the Spymasters take turns giving clues. Each clue consists of a single word connected to the meaning of the words they want you to guess, followed by a number representing how many of the available cards the clue word applies to. In the back-of-the-box example, one Codemaster has given the clue “Hot: 2”, meaning that the clue “hot" is connected to two of the available words in the array.
I assume the intended words are “fire" and “dog”.
After you guess a word, the identity of that card is revealed. Hopefully it will be an agent of your own colour, but it could also be someone on the other side, or even the assassin. 755
This is marked by the people cards placed on top of the words: red and blue agents, along with innocent tan bystanders.
The team guesses one word at a time until they’ve either made a mistake, chosen to stop, or reached the maximum number of guesses for that round—which is generally one higher than the number given by the Spymaster, to allow for catch-up guesses on previously missed clues. Then the other team takes a turn, and so on until all agents of one colour have been revealed or someone has lost by guessing the assassin.
The fun part is trying to come up with clues that match as many of the words as possible, without leading your team astray and causing them to guess words that are incorrect. For example, there was a time when I was trying to clue “horn”, “bell”, and “pit”, but not “triangle” or “rock”. So there was a connection with music, bands, etc., but something too general might have suggested more than I was aiming for. I ultimately went with the safer route of “trumpet: 2” for “horn” and “bell”, but I could have tried to be a bit more ambitious. My most successful clue so far has been “troll: 4”, which led my teammate to successfully guess “bridge”, “needle”, “dragon”, and “ghost”. It can definitely be interesting trying to figure out how people think and seeing how well they know you—at one point my husband said that he felt very strongly about which word I was trying to clue, but he was nevertheless outvoted by two other teammates who ended up choosing the wrong word.
The important thing to emphasize here is that this gameplay can generate a lot of laughter and recriminations. Clues can go wrong in all kinds of ways, when the guessers come up with a connection that the Spymaster had somehow overlooked. Or the Spymaster can come up with a solid clue, but the guessers can be unfamiliar with the connection (e.g., “sound” was supposed to go with “garden" in one of our recent games). Other times, the Spymaster can just be completely wrong: I’ve heard of the clue “Russia: 1” given to describe the word “Berlin”, at which point much confusion was had by all. The amount of craziness obviously depends to a certain extend on your play group, but Codenames definitely has the potential to create an uproar, in a good way. 755