Review: Codenames

The party game that has won a dumb number of awards and that all my friends like, even my Dad can play it.

In Codenames you divide 2-8 players into 2 teams (but if you have anything less than 5 people you can find better games). The goal of each team is to find the location of all of your spies, each team have a ‘spymaster’ who knows the location of their teams’ agents with a clever little key. They have a single word that they can give as a clue that somehow corresponds to the ‘location’ of the agents. The rest of the team then have a minute or 5 to then guess which of the locations the spy master means, without accidentally guessing one of the other teams’ agents or the assassin which means an instant lose.

The key on the left shows on the grid of words which are the blue teams agents, the red teams, the bystanders and the assassin.

The only caveat is that the spymaster must also first start by telling you how many locations he is hinting to. A simple 1 location hint is easy, the clue “super” is easily “hero”. The game really kicks off when the spymaster risks it to get multiple locations guessed. To this day my Dad raves about the day his single clue of “Netflix” bagged our team 4 locations – “scorpion”, “helicopter”, “fire”, and “crime”.

That single turn has never been repeated since. But the consistent level of fun has been, as a spymaster it is painful to say “Jonah” and hear one of your team members cry out “Maybe he means revolutionist? Jonah started a revolution, right?” rather than the painfully obvious “whale” card. This is made up in spades though when you hear the other team pick out a location of one of your agents and not one of theirs.

Why do we like it?

Party board games are notorious, you have Pictionary to Articulate, games that are surrounded by general knowledge. Codenames relies on next to nothing in order to pick the game up, and even the quietest people that we know have perked up to suggest where the spymaster has been pointing their teams.

The cross-table dynamics are also just funny, as soon as the spymaster utters a clue the other team start suggesting too loudly that maybe the clue “Himalayas” has a clear link to “Panda” rather than “Mountain”. Or the groans you have to stifle when what you thought was a joke turned about to be the right answer – how was I supposed to know the Himalayas had red pandas. I’m still not even convinced the spymaster knew that.

And that’s the point as a spymaster, you watch your team make tentative links that you wouldn’t have dreamt up. Until you play as a member of your team and realise you have absolutely no idea what your spymaster means by “spindle”.

This game is a treat, it flies slightly under the radar amongst our huge collection but as soon as we have a small gathering of people who just want to do something – we crack Codenames out almost every time.

TLDR: A word guessing game for big groups. Fun.