So, I’m holding off on reviewing this one until I can play it in person, but I did pick it up and play it on Saturday for our digital board game night. I had to modify oh so slightly how the game was played, not changing any of the main mechanics, but just one thing that I’ll talk about coming up here in a second. But initial thoughts are this is a fun filler game.

In Cross Clues you are laying out a X and Y axis of cards, so A to D and 1 to 4, for a medium difficulty. These are tiles, and under these tiles you slip a word card so that it shows one word. This word might under A might be Mars and under 3 might be Mouth. So you’re trying to give a one word clue to get the other players to guess the intersection that you have in your hand. So if I had A3, I’d say something like Candy. The players then discuss, come to a consensus and if they guess A3 correctly, you get to place the card down on it’s spot in the grid. If they guess incorrectly, the card goes face down next to the board so they don’t know what they got. This goes on with the players giving clues to the other players, everyone can be a clue giver, until all the locations have been guessed correctly or incorrectly. Then you compare your score against the game and see how well you did. There are a few rules on how to give clues and you play with a five minute timer to see how well you do.

Because we were playing it digitally we modified the game in two ways. First, we did away with the time limit. While that would definitely ramp up the intensity of the game, because we were playing via Zoom, people talking over each other and discussing doesn’t work as well as in person. So the rush of time would have just caused confusion and probably things to go slower rather than faster. The other thing is that we obviously can’t pass out the grid location cards, the A1, A2, A3, etc. So that meant that we played the two or three player variant, even though we had 8 of us playing it, which is over the max player count. We, myself and my wife, were the clue givers so in the variant, we had two cards each for thinking about and giving clues, and everyone else was guessing. This still worked extremely well with just the two of us giving clues and everyone had fun with it. Now I do want to try and play this properly in person sometime in the future, and I’m sure it’ll happen, because the game works well on Zoom, but to get the full experience for reviewing, I want to play it timed and with everyone getting a grid location card.

Now, I can already say, I really like this game as a party game and a filler game. The game plays fast, even with not playing it timed, the games we played went by quickly, and we played three games in a row. This for me is a more interesting version of basic Codenames where you are giving a clue for people to guess a word, but in this one you have more creativity, I feel, than base Codenames. It also has a bit of that Just One vibe to it as well. It’s cooperative, so that’s part of it, but you’re also still giving just a one word clue. This is a game that I can see playing with my parents on a holiday, pulling out at a convention when those happen again, or using to start off or wind down a game night. I like games that have the versatility for that, because as much as I love bigger and heavier games, having a game that works well in almost any situation means that it’s getting pulled of the shelf more often.

I like the aesthetic of the game a lot as well. It has a 1950’s supermarket advertisement vibe to it, mixed with a little bit of Fallout, and it works well for the game. It gives it a classic and approachable look that makes the game, again, more accessible to a larger audience. The design is also really clean so you’re never confused by extra symbols or anything on the card, the location cards are always just a letter and a number. The word cards, have four words on them, two on the front, two on the back, but how it’s set-up, you only see one so there is never confusion. The package for the game just works really well and has that classic family photo of playing a game and laughing just baked into it.

One thing that I will say as something to be aware of, not really a negative, a medium or whatever level of the game you’re playing at can vary wildly depending on the word combinations. The first game we played the only hard word to create a junction with was avocado, but we also played a game, forget if it was our second or third where we had cauliflower on one access and strawberry and tomato on the other access, so there was a ton of overlap, plus wood and jungle so much nature going on that clues were a lot harder because a clue like garden could have been two different things. So just the combination of words an cause the ease or difficulty level of giving clues to vary wildly. Not a negative really, because it’s fun to see what sort of creative clues you can come up with, but it can slow down the game, which is probably why they have the timer.

Overall, though, my first impressions are that I really enjoy this game. I think because of the number of words per card and the number of word cards, plus the fact that they are being laid out in a grid so the combinations and intersections will be different, this game has a ton of replay value. And for a party game that is extremely important to me, because so many, Cards Against Humanity, Apples to Apples, and Catch Phrase, has a limited replayability at best. This is definitely a filler game sleeper to checkout this year and one that would probably be getting bigger buzz is conventions were happening.

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