Codenames 43

[El Grillo]

FAN + MILLIONAIRE?

[JR4]

Just a one word clue. MILLIONAIRE is almost certainly blue. FAN looks obvious.

FAN - MILLIONAIRE for me.

[Azoth]

No arguments from me.

Point to FAN
Point to MILLIONAIRE

[pindicator]

FAN is blue
MILLIONAIRE is blue

Blue wins!



Full Board:

TOKYO	FAN	MEXICO	PARACHUTE	CHAIR
PIE	FLUTE	SWING	PISTOL	AUSTRALIA
DEATH	BOOM	MODEL	IRON	CROSS
DECK	COOK	MOLE	PITCH	BUGLE
TOWER	GLASS	WHALE	MILLIONAIRE	JUPITER

[color=#1E92F7]

[T-hawk]

Great match everyone, all three games went right down to the wire. The recap from my end will be pretty obvious, but here it is anyway:

Poolside 4 = Deck + Chair + Fan + Millionaire, or a lifeguard Tower would also be a hit, and Glass was an acceptable gray. I missed the connection to Model - I didn't think of the meaning as a person, I only thought of it as a model toy. I thought Fan was very strong to Poolside, but the team barely noticed it.

Why is the clue Redentor not Redeemer? I think it's pointing us to the Latin world, with MEXICO in place for Brazil.
Why is the clue about the statue at all, rather than Christianity more generally? I think it's pointing to TOWER.

So I would say Redentor 3 is CROSS/MEXICO/TOWER, with DEATH as a +1 in case we get something wrong (but otherwise MODEL as the +1 from the previous round).

CROSS/MEXICO/DEATH wouldn't make you think of the statue in Rio. It could simply be clued as Catholic 3.
CROSS/DEATH/TOWER, you'd say Reedemer not Redemptor.

Redentor 3 = Cross + Mexico + Tower. Azoth nailed this one absolutely perfectly, I was mentally cheering and applauding.

That's MOLE, a small burrowing animal, but such a specific 1-word clue suggests something is wrong.

Yeah, something went wrong - but on red's side! They were targeting Swing. I judged we had a better shot to win if I just shut up and got out of the way for them to hit that. For us to win that turn, I needed two unlikely things both to go right - a good clue for Swing + Mole (which I didn't have, something like Sandpit or Playground or Ground would run into Pitch for red), and for the team to also still get Millionaire + Fan from Poolside. You guys just kinda gave up on guessing Poolside words; I was waiting on my third clue to see if anyone gave me any more direction, but you didn't. Azoth mentioned Fan only briefly and the team never came back to thinking about it, so I couldn't count on it. So my better bet was to let red fall into their own trap.

"It wasn't one instrument of Flute/Bugle so it won't be the other" - well, it's easy when I have the answer key, but I would venture that more often the right logic would be the other way around, if it's not one instrument then it would be the other, since one of them is what would make you think of Music as a clue, with the other as an acceptable gray.

Yeah, Music was too vague a clue to hit Bugle + Pitch with so many other possibilities on the board. I would have clued that pair as Reveille and hope somebody knew it, or maybe Fanfare (though it's questionable whether that's a legal clue with Fan on the board.)

[El Grillo]

GG team!

Perhaps Trombone for BUGLE + PITCH, since it is the brass instrument with the distinction of being able to play the entire range of pitches using a slide rather than valves.

[pindicator]

I think that was the most difficult board I've ever had to clue for. I knew I had two difficult words with Jupiter and Bugle, and my first priority was to find clues that I could use for them and other red words. It seemed like every clue I thought of either tied to a blue word or the assassin.
Especially Cook.

'Largest' was a bit of an epiphany; I didn't want to just clue Big or Large because that would fit in Australia. In hindsight I wish I would have saved this clue for later on because everyone clued in to exactly what I was thinking. Even though we nailed our first 3 and Blue stumbled a little on their first clue I did not feel good about our odds of winning. I was having a lot of difficulty pairing Bugle with pretty much anything on our board - all the connections seemed tenuous and honestly there were always other words on the board that seemed a better connection.

When Blue took Model off the board for us that was the first moment I thought we had a chance to win. I just needed to get 2 pairs of 2, as I could not see a way for Blue to clue all their words in one guess. Unfortunately I could not figure out how.

I ran through a number of ideas for my second clue. First was Camp 3, hoping for PITCH a tent + Camp Cook + Bugle for morning call. But that did not feel like a good Bugle connection and I really wanted to get Bugle off the board. Also, pairing Bugle with Iron just did not seem like a good idea at all: maybe a horse connection for horse track and Reverie? But again, that felt like a very flimsy connection to aim for. My second idea was Notes 3, aiming for the same three words: Cook (flavor notes) + Pitch + Bugle. I figured Flute and Bugle were pretty interchangeable for this. Unfortunately at the last moment I realized it clued Millionaire very closely with Bank Notes. I literally realized this as I was typing up the post to submit the clue. Probably should have taken some time after this, but I rushed out a substitute.

Music 2 was aiming for BUgle + Pitch, with Flute as an acceptable loss. I really thought Bugle & Flute would be seen as equal options in this, and so was hoping at least Pitch would come off the board first. Really was discouraged to read that because Flute was grey it meant I was not going for Bugle at all. And Swing.... yikes, that was just a clean miss by me. I did not even think of Swing Music when I was double checking the board. But again, I rushed it.

I like how Commodore put it:

Of course the last explanation for flute SWING being a music miss is that the spymaster is a human being and sometimes we just miss things.

And Sunrise nailed it on the head in his last post:

Maybe pindicator totally missed the baseball possibility. My lean is still he saw Flute as an acceptable gray and either overlooked Swing Music or thought we’d exclude via the baseball alternative we did arrive at.

I was looking at a number of baseball words, btw. But with Fan & Swing both as blue words that was never going to work.

The clue that I did not think of until after Music was Presentation 4. This would have been a little shaky with IRON: Ironing your clothes to present yourself well. And BUGLE as well: Reverie being the presentation of an impending race. But I think it would have done a better job of putting you all on the right words than Music did.

Also, I did not consider Trumpet, but I really don't see the Pitch connection for that word. I would more expect Swing + Bugle, same with Trombone.

With the last clue I was trying to find any clue to connect Bugle, Iron, and Cook. I didn't think I had the luxury of Presentation here because we could not miss and I had to get a strong clue towards Cook & Iron to at least give us a chance. Plus I thought you would take that as me pointing you towards FAN for the 4th word (making a Presentation to Fans). After being unable to think of anything, I figured the best chance was to hope Sunrise could convince the other two of it; I really did not see any other out for us. It's a pity he got skipped, because he was spot on with his assessments.

In the end, I think we did really good to get as far as we did. Without blue gifting us Model I didn't we would have had any business sniffing a win with this board; as I said before, it's probably the most difficult I've ever had to clue for. I wish I would have thought of Presentation earlier, and missing SWING was a total gaffe, but the end result there was we were a 50/50 away from a win even with all that. So good job team, it just didn't quite fall our way.

[Azoth]

Well done T-hawk, and good game everyone. Another close match - Largest 3 was a great clue and a little more luck would have seen Red the winner.

[JR4]

Good game. That could have gone either way.

Are you up for another game?