Codenames 20

[Lewwyn]

screen and plot are good, missed them in my quick run through

[rho21]

Mercury, Laser and Ray seem obvious.

Others:
Plot - of the story
Screen - to watch a sci-fi program, and there are often some scattered about on advanced technology
Missile - we have them now, but they're often a thing in sci-fi
Soldier - ditto

And from specific well-known sci-fi:
Princess (Leia)
(Captain's) Log
(Star) Date

Looking at spoilers, I quite like Cover too.

My order of preference: Laser, Ray, Mercury >> Plot, Screen > Princess, Cover, Missile.

[Lewwyn]

I'm heavily against Princess, I highly doubt the youngster DP is making a princess leia connection.

I also like plot and screen ahead of mercury which I think could work but isn't quite as strong as the others

[sunrise089]

Azoth should chime in, but all of us have Laser and Ray in our top-3.

Point to Laser
Point to Ray

[Dp101]

Both Blue

[T-hawk]

Minor point of order: By the standard rulebook, a hyphenated compound word doesn't qualify as a single-word clue.  But since nobody objected, probably best to just let it stand.

[Dp101]

Minor point of order: By the standard rulebook, a hyphenated compound word doesn't qualify as a single-word clue.  But since nobody objected, probably best to just let it stand.

I PM’d David Corperial and Pindicator to see if they were fine with it, and there were no complaints. I am sorry though, I think I missed that rule when searching to see if it was legal or not.

[rho21]

That's cool, the rules allow a lot of leeway in terms of house rules, and more importantly specify that the final arbiter if there's any uncertainty is the opposing spymaster. So you definitely did the right thing.

I don't think the spirit of the rules is broken by hyphenated words, so long as they're aiming to get across a single concept and are a common phrasing - see also the rules for acronyms. Hyphenated words are probably banned by default because it's easier to do that than to makie it clear in the rules exactly which would be allowed and which wouldn't.

[Azoth]

At first glance, my top 6 choices were MERCURY, ANTARCTICA, LASER, PLOT, RAY, and MISSILE. I missed SCREEN, which are ubiquitous in scifi: another strong choice. I don't like PRINCESS/SOLDIER, and like Lewwyn says, I think we should avoid words that are better associated with another genre, or refer mainly to specific franchises. The clue wasn't Skywalker or Spy, after all. My personal preference would be SCREEN -> MERCURY -> PLOT next, but I'm happy with MERCURY -> PLOT -> SCREEN if that's the team consensus.

[rho21]

I don't think the order of the next three matters too much: with this size of clue we're likely to be expecting some grey speedbumps anyway, and we'll guess all of these answers in time.

I'm not convinced by the argument that we should avoid references to specific franchises: any Star Wars clue would immediately lose other sci-fi references we might be meant to get (Mercury, in this case). Anyway, if we do get the next three right, I'm happy guessing something generic (Missile?) for our final word.