Why I Don’t Like Codenames

Let’s lay the groundwork. I expect that a lot of people like Codenames a lot. And for me, it is basically always a miss. I know, in fact, that my opinion is less than popular because Codenames sells really well, which means that people are trying it and buying a copy for themselves. Which, even though it isn’t for me, I like because more people are playing games.

But what is it about Codenames that isn’t for me? Firstly, it bills itself, or gets treated like a party style game. It really isn’t a party style game. There is a lot of downtime of people thinking and staring at the board. Either the spymaster who is coming up with their next clue. Or the guessers who are using the clue. And that doesn’t make for a party like experience. It is only even okay as a social experience or a lighter game that way. So first issue, there is too much downtime.

Secondly, you are either clever or wrong. Let me talk about this one a little bit more, but when you give a clue either you give a good clue and people get it. Or people mess it up, or you mess it up, and it goes wrong. In Codenames, which is already tight with your creativity, it is a game that can make you feel bad or make you feel dumb. This ties into the first issue, for a game that is supposed to be lighter, that doesn’t feel good.

The App Is Better

Downtime

The app fixes a lot of these issues in a lot of ways. Firstly, let’s talk about that downtime. The great thing about an app is that the downtime doesn’t matter. How does it not matter, like almost every app you expect that there is going to be time between when you take your turn or action and when you can play again. Apps always teach us that, there is a timer before you get another life or attempt in other games. We know you can’t just sit there and wait with an app.

Plus, downtime is less of an issue when you have five or ten games going. And it is easy to play that many games. Again, why? Because Codenames is a game where context doesn’t really matter. I need to know the word you give as a clue and how many guesses I have. That’s going to be it. If I missed one the previous time or sometime before, I look at the history and see that. I don’t need to hold anything in my head. So when I check, I play a few different games.

Finally around this idea of downtime there are solo challenges as well. Somethings that you play, either giving clues to a group of others or trying to solve those clues yourself. But it’s a one off, get the clue solved and call it good and that’s it. Nice quick hits that you can play. They refresh even more slowly, but it’s a filler activity between game play, or can be the only way you play the game and you know your exact timings.

Cleverness

I think that the app also encourages some more cleverness. Let’s start with the solo challenges. When I play as the spymaster, I get rewarded for giving more answers for the one clue I give. So it encourages me to push for some risky clues and guesses. And that is great because it takes away the pressure of winning all for the sake of winning. Yes, that sounds odd, but I don’t have feedback across the table of people thinking it was a dumb clue.

This then spills over into the regular games as well. I play with real people in those games. But there is no one sitting across the table from me. There is no immediate feedback on if I did a good job or not. And if I make a mistake, it’s easier to gloss over it because I am playing a bunch of other games. And because there wasn’t five minutes of me sitting in front of people only to give a bad clue or only to make a bad guess.

It takes away that human element from the game. Now, normally I find that to be a bad thing. On BGA (Board Game Arena) it is often a bit of a miss. Things take so long and you lose context and reads on people for games that might need them. But here, it’s easier to just brush it off and move onto the next thing.

Final Thoughts on the Codenames App

I expect that there is more that I can talk about this game. There are likely going to be more features that I can talk about. And there are even some elements, like getting words and unlocking certain modes of the game that I didn’t talk about. A lot of that falls into standard app stuff. And I mean that in a good way.

But in terms of what it feels like to actually play the game, I really like it. I think it is a much more preferable way to play the game. And I hope that I laid out why I thought that well. I realize that your milage might be different because you might like Codenames a whole lot more than I do. But even if you do, I think the app will scratch an itch that gives you a similar feeling to playing it. I don’t think it’ll have people getting rid of their copies, but playing it alongside and if you don’t like the game that well, like I don’t, it might help you enjoy it more.

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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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Why did I pick Chronicles of Crime?

There are multiple reasons, first, I really like games that have some sort of puzzle or deduction to them. Escape room games like Unlock or Exit are good examples, Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition or Arkham Horror The Card Game even have elements of them. So I like detective style games as well, even Clue, the classic, I still enjoy because of the puzzle of figuring out information as efficiently as possible.

The other thing is that is has an interesting app integration piece. Now, that’s going to disappoint some people, but I really find it interesting, though it can’t be played without the app. The app scans QR codes allowing you to interact with people and ask them about clues or other people you might have found during you investigation. But that’s not the coolest piece of the app in my opinion. Instead, there is a video component that you can use basically as VR if you want, where you can look all around and see the crime scene. While you’re doing that, you’re telling the other players what you see and they’re grabbing what might be useful clues for you to use later in your investigation.

The other thing that’s really cool about this for me is that there is a community aspect to it. It’s not just the company making scenarios, you can go out and get scenarios that other people have created and put together so maybe someone did a dog napping or there was a grisly murder, you don’t know. But there can be an ever increasing amount of story just from the base game. Plus there are expansions, there is a Noir expansion that looks cool, but I’m more excited for the Redview expansion which is a kids on bikes, almost RPG like version of the game, so it doesn’t have to just be crime, you can do wildly different things with it.

So hopefully that explains why I was interested in the game and picked it up. Does it sound like a game that would be cool? Maybe see if your FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store) and get it ordered in for you and help them during these times.

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Both Games:
In both games you are divided into two teams. There’s one person who is the leader of each team who is going to be giving clues. These clues are going to correspond to words or pictures on cards on the table. The goal of the game is to get your team to get all your words or pictures first by giving a one word clue and how many words that relates to. But beware that you don’t get them to guess their opponents or an innocent bystanders card as that will end your turn guessing. And if you get the assassin, that’ll cause your team to lose.

Let’s meet the two competitors:

Codenames
This is the original, older, version of the game. You play with a slightly larger grid of words in this game so each team has more words to guess. The other mechanics are going to be the same, but as the original it’s the one that more people have heard of. All the words are the cards are single word per card, there are some fun things that you can do with using multiple meanings of the same word to try and get people to get two seemingly separate words, but that can be a limit to base Codenames.

Codenames: Pictures
This one is played on a slightly smaller grid, though if you have the cards from original code names, for what is supposed to be guessed for each team, you can use cards either direction. On the cards are going to be weird images, it would be something like a spaceship flying through the hole of a doughnut. The guessing is very similar, but each picture has more than one concept built into it from the start.

Fight!

When we’re looking at which one is more popular, and looking around the crowd, there’s clearly more shirts for Codenames in there than there is for Codenames Pictures which might be the motivation for this fight. It starts out with them mirroring the moves of each other, which you’d expect from siblings who play basically the same way. As the fight goes on though, Codenames Picutres is starting to show off some more creative moves. They’ve managed to combo together several moves. Codenames is struggling to keep up with the moves. It’s slower plodding offense is not getting through to Codenames Pictures. Codenames looks like it has more endurance though and is able to kickout from an early finisher by Codenames Pictures. But using a move from it’s siblings playbook, Codenames Pictures is able to hit a big move and end it.

Winner: Codenames Pictures

When it comes down to it, what Codenames lacks in excitement, Codenames Pictures can make up for. Codenames can take a while if the words and the card just don’t chain together well, but in Codenames Pictures, because the pictures are more abstract you’re able to create more interesting one word clues that allow for cool moments of getting several cards at once instead of maybe two. That makes the game feel more like a party game and something that can be pulled out with any group. It’s also not language dependent like Codenames is, so if you have a group of people who might not know all the words in English on the cards but can understand well enough, they can join in on a game of Codenames Pictures.

I think that Codenames is okay but as I’ve played the two different games, I don’t know that I really care to play Codenames again if Codenames Pictures is an option. There’s certainly no reason to have both in your collection, and Pictures just feels like more of a party game and more of a fun time which is what a light game like both of them is really meant to feel like.

Which of these two do you prefer? Do you agree with my choice for winner or do you prefer regular Codenames, if so, why?

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It might be a bad idea to hire a bunch of blind fireworks employees, but that’s the theory behind Hanabi, you, and everyone else you’re playing with, are trying to create the best fireworks show possible, but you can’t see your own hand of cards. In fact, they are facing away from you so that everyone else can see them. On your turn you can do one of three things, you can spend a clue token to give someone a clue about the fireworks that they have, you can either point to all the cards of a certain number of all the cards of a certain color in their hand and let them know what the number or color is. Or you can play down a card onto a firework either start a firework, playing the one card, or to continue a firework, playing the next highest number of that color. Or, finally, you can discard a card to get back a clue token. If there aren’t clue tokens, you can’t give a clue, so hopefully you know what’s safe in your hand to discard or play.

This game has a ton of fun tension to it. Does the person who is coming up know what to do, can you give them a clue that will keep them from discarding the only five of a color and maybe discard a one that has already been played. The mechanics of the game are really simple for the amount of tension that it causes. Sometimes, you think you have the perfect clue, because you want them to know that they have a blue four, but, then you realize that they have more blue cards and they have more fours, so it won’t focus them in on a single card. Or maybe you want to let them know that they can discard a card so you can get another clue back, but is that the best use of your clue to get a clue? But sometimes there might not be a better option.

Hanabi is one of those games that the longer you play it, the better you’re going to get at it, because you’ll know what the better clues are. And, I think that is what really makes Hanabi shine as a game. Mainly because if you can remember where cards are in your hand and previous clues, clues for you can then be built upon. Maybe blue isn’t that useful and four isn’t that useful, but using both will help you get to the blue four, but hopefully will also let people know about other parts of their hand. For example, if they can see the blue five, and the blue fireworks are at a 3, they know that their other blue card isn’t needed. This, however, requires both the clues given to be good and that the person can remember, and while I think that it’s possible to do both, it’s really hard to know since, you don’t know what five cards you have in your own hand perfectly.

For me, this is one of those games that when it gets to the table, because it plays fast, 15-30 minutes depending on number of players and familiarity with the game, it generally gets played a second time, and maybe a third. Now, I can see how this might go over poorly, I’ve played with different groups and it’s gone over well, but especially for a new person into a group of experienced players, they won’t understand the full strategy of giving clues, because of inexperience. If this leads to visible frustration in the more experienced players, I can definitely see that souring the experience for the new player. And if you are a player who would get frustrated, I can understand not wanting to teach it, especially if you are going for the elusive 25 point perfect victory. But generally, this is a game that’ll get played twice and because I haven’t gotten the perfect 25 and no one I’ve played with has, we always want to try and do better the second time.

Piggy backing off of what I just said, I think that is one of the things that makes this a good cooperative game. And while not all cooperative games do this, I think that this game and Letter Jam which uses a number of similar things to Hanabi, do well is create that score that you always want to better. I assume that you could end up getting perfect scores on both and decide that you’re done with them because you can’t get better, but I think that isn’t that likely to happen or happen often that Hanabi is always going to be a challenge. And the fact that the deck is a random shuffle means that all the games are going to be different, though you’ll go through all of the cards.

Overall, you can tell that I really enjoy this game. I really like cooperative games, and I like that this one comes in a small package. Not only that, but it also does something that is different. People understand the idea of playing cards down in ascending order, but Hanabi is a twist upon that they won’t have seen. I’ve had good luck with this in several settings and player counts. I think it’s better at a higher count because you have more options of clues to give, but at two players it was fun as well. It’s been a while since I’ve played this one, but, now I want to play it again. And because of the time frame for it, it is one that I can pull out and get to the table easier.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B
Casual Grade: B+

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