Codenames Rules and General Discussion

[novice]

You would use Clue 0 to specify what words are not your colour. Might be useful if there is already a limited candidate set of answers. It's probably very situational.

[Psillycyber]

Hey, an idea for a codenames variant just occurred to me. This variant has just a pinch of "Mafia / Werewolf" flavor to it.

The idea is for there to be a double-agent on each team of five guessers. Nobody else would know who the double-agent was on each team, even the cluemasters.

The double-agent would get to look at the colors of the game board at the beginning of the game just like the cluemaster, but the double-agent would have the win condition of the opposite team. It would be the double-agent's task to purposefully mislead the rest of the team into bad guesses with dubious reasoning.

The choosing of words would have to be done by voting. Guessers would vote for the next word they wanted to point at, and as soon as a word had three votes (3 / 5), then that word would get revealed. The double-agent could vote too, but this means that the double-agent would need to successfully mislead half of the remaining guessers on the team (2 / 4) in order to throw the team off.

There could then be a bit of meta-gaming over the question of whether a person's suggestion, if in error, was either an honest mistake or a purposeful one, and thus whether the team should trust their reasoning going forward.

[novice]

Sounds interesting, and also makes me wonder who the unwitting double-agent on our team in Codenames 3 is.

There should be some sort of bonus for naming your double-agent as well.

[DaveV]

...double-agent on each team...

Other people are welcome to play this variant, but I hope we'd have enough people to keep playing the vanilla version. I enjoy a game that fosters cooperation and positive interaction. I'm not a convincing liar, so I'd be terrible at this game. Judging by my limited reading of the werewolf games, they often seem to lead to hurt feelings and grudges.

[BRickAstley]

There's nothing specific about it in the rules, so what do people thing of possessives as clues, like "Santa's"? It's still one word, and it's not a contraction of two different words, but since it isn't straight alphanumeric I could see it being contested.

I ask because I had considered using "Santa's" as a clue in CN2 but decided to pass on it for then. :P

[El Grillo]

I personally don't see any problems with that. As long as everyone is on board, I can't immediately think of any edge cases where possessives would break the game.

[T-hawk]

Possessives sound fine to me too.

From Codenames 2:

Birdsong seems to me as being two separate words into one: bird + song.

I hadn't thought of that, use halves of a compound word as essentially multiple clues. Feels a bit unkosher, but the rules wouldn't seem to forbid it. Any opinions?

And I guess why this game isn't published in German, where you can compound any amount of crap into a single word

[novice]

I think it's fine as long as it's a commonly used compound word and not just an inventionconvenience.

[Lewwyn]

I think it's fine as long as it's a commonly used compound word and not just an inventionconvenience.

dittoagree

[El Grillo]

We let someone clue DOUBLEPLUSGOOD 3 just this weekend, because in the end we're all here to relax and have fun, right?