How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?

If you've memorized all the layouts, you don't need any kind of clue, so you don't need a kind of clue that's banned. You could for example clue "Sausage" every time and your team would play as well as the bot in the article. To play better than the bot, you might want to clue about words for 1 turn or so.

You clearly don't understand the article since it's not about clues at all, but entirely about guessing.

Basically, the claim is that based entirely on the pattern of the board (revealed red, blue, and white cards), there are so few legal board configurations (the cards that the spymasters are using), that the field operatives can ignore the hint the spymaster gave, and guess correct cards anyway based on the board's revealed information.

Effectively, a game where the red team uses this strategy might go like this:

Red Team Spymaster: Word unlimited

Red Team Field Operatives: <pick card at random, get white at the lower right>

Blue Team Spymaster: <Real Hint> 2

Blue Team Field Operatives: <pick 2 correct cards at the upper left>

Red Team Spymaster: Word unlimited

Red Team Field Operatives: "Well, there's only one spymaster card with a white card in the lower right and two blue cards in the upper left, so now we know where every card is and can pick all the red cards" <wins>

In a real practical implementation here, the spymaster would probably actually clue "<death card hint> 0" each turn in order to ensure their team can safely pick at random until there's enough information to know which board they're on.

Please point me to the rule that bans this: https://czechgames.com/files/rules/codenames-rules-en.pdf

Note that in the described game the spymaster didn't give out a clue like this; the article states "From the given clue, we were unable to [guess all of our remaining words]". I guess it was a teammate that suggested the other strategy.

Very cool! A couple of months ago, after playing Codenames for the first time, I devised a strategy that any team of humans can learn, in order to win in 3 moves, guaranteed, every game. It only takes a few minutes to learn.

Imagine you have a Codenames board and you're on the blue team. The key is that you can represent the board as a text of 1s and 0s, where 1 is blue and 0 is not blue:

0 1 0 0 1

0 0 0 0 1

1 1 0 0 0

1 0 0 0 1

0 0 1 0 0

The next key is to realize that each sequence of 4 cards can be thought of as a 4-digit binary number, for example the first binary sequence above is "0100", or 4. The second binary sequence is "1000", or 8.

The strategy is to simply communicate the numbers 4 and 8 to your team—so we can simply choose a word that starts with the 4th letter of the alphabet (d) and ends in the 8th letter of the alphabet (h). If we tell our team "ditch", they'll know exactly what the first 8 cards are.

Repeat this for 3 turns, and your team has figured out 8 cards each turn, for a total of 24 cards out of 25 total. The final card can be inferred simply—on the third turn, if any card is unaccounted for, your team knows it must be in the 25th position.

I just hope your teammates know how to count in binary.

(N.B. the strategy can be optimized by eliminating less-common letters of the English alphabet, like J, where it may be difficult to think of words that end in that letter)

I'd also attempted something like this years ago [1] based on word2vec, and it played decently! Occasionally it would throw out nonsensical clues or guesses, but was usable.

I'm sure with more modern embeddings/tools one could make a really excellent not.

[1] https://github.com/bcspragu/Codenames

I gotta disagree, I'm way more accepting of Scrabble list memorizers (even though I'll never be one) because word knowledge was intended by the game designers to be a part of the game.

Memorizing the spymaster layouts was almost certainly not intended by the designers of Codenames. Probably someone realized it was possible, but as other commenters mention the increased friction of fully randomized layouts isn't worth it when almost no one will want to do this.

It's unacceptable since it circumvents the core aspect of the game.

+1, but one thing about So Clover is that not really any game in it. It's more of an activity. A very engaging activity, and one that has worked with every group I've tried it on, gamers and non-gamers alike, and my current #1 choice if I was asked to bring some games to some non-gaming social event.

What I mean by there not being a game to it is that there's no winning or losing, or even evaluating success. Everyone gives their best clues (by some metric; sometimes people optimize for fun rather than clarity), you solve the boards and get a score, but the score is totally meaningless. It can't even be compared across sessions.

It turns out to be quite hard to add a game into it. I thought about the problem for a year before deciding that there was no viable way to do it within the constraints of the physical game, and it'd need to be online. For the last few weeks I've been working on an async online word-game inspired by So Clover, where one of the tihngs I wanted to do was to add an actual game (as a competitive mode), and so far the feedback from my playtesters has been that they're not interested in any of those plans, and just want to use it as a chill word game sandbox and share puzzle links over WhatsApp. (The site isn't ready for public consumption, but if anyone here wants to try the game out with some friends, hit me up with an email and I'll send you a link. Contact details in HN profile.)

I played "Poetry for Neaderthals" once a few months ago, and concluded that its enjoyability must really depend on the group. My wife and I were playing at a meetup with a couple of party-game guys who maybe weren't the brightest bulbs in the box (they were the ones who brought the game, but they'd never played it before either). This made it no trouble at all when either of us was the "master," but excruciatingly painful when either of them was.

Like, suppose the word is WINDOW. They'd be like, "Um... house. [long pause] Grass, sky. Glass! Um... [long pause] see? Eye look at?" And I'd be like, "This is a thing in the wall of a house. You can see through it. It's made out of glass. Um... it has panes, and a sill. It might have drapes next to it. You go to it when you want to see out of the house, but it's not the door. A thief might come in through it," etc. etc.

Once you realize you can just say whatever you like (as long as it's in words of one syllable), it seems like the whole game is "cooked." Even with a group of uniformly competent players, I feel like it would just devolve into listening very carefully to a rapid-fire stream of words to try to detect any slips — i.e. real-time proofreading — which to me doesn't count as an enjoyable way to spend a game night.

I did a quick search, and there are generators that I guess you bring up on your phone, like so:

https://code-names.netlify.app

That adds pretty noticeable friction over the pre-printed cards, so I think the pre-printed cards make a lot of sense to have.

Note that the game already comes with 25 colored tiles (red / blue / white) which are used to cover the game board, so what you describe could be easily done with the existing game by putting those 25 tiles in a bag, shaking it, and having the spymasters secretly draw all 25 and fill in a grid in the order they draw them, and then proceed with the game as normal from there. I doubt many people would want to bother though.

> that is if the spymasters are not informed of the position for the other team

The spymasters both know all information, so it is indeed even simpler.

> To account for rotations, we can divide the final value by 4 since every arrangement can be rotated and is therefore valid.

Note that this is only approximately correct, since some layouts will have nontrivial symmetries. (Edit: Actually no they won't due to parity reasons! Oops. So that step is exact after all.)

Edit: Actually, this isn't correct either, and in a more serious way:

> Of the 25 cards, there are 7 white, 8 red, 8 blue, 1 black and 1 double agent that can be red or blue, also deciding which team goes first. We can treat this final card as one of a kind, then double the formula output to account for cases where it is swapped to the other team.

On the layout cards, nothing distinguishes the double agent -- the double agent is purely a matter of representation, it's not part of the actual layout. So doing things this way will give you a number that's too large by a factor of about 8 or 9.

What you want to do here (ignoring rotations) is take 25!/(9!8!7!) to get the count with 9 red and 8 blue, then double it to include the count with 8 red and 9 blue, then divide by 4 to account for rotation (contrary to what I said earlier no need to account for symmetries because the numbers mean that none of the layouts can be rotationally symmetric), so you get a total of

25!/(9!8!7!2) = 105,172,353,000

So yeah about 9 times smaller than what you wrote. For what it's worth, anyway. :P

This could actually make a good interview problem for the ability to focus on the stated goal and to play well with others. Use Codenames or create a game with many exploits that will jump out to smart people. Be explicit the point of the exercise is for everyone to have fun and play in the spirit of the game. Do they do that, or does their desire to be right and “figure it out” trample the real goal?

Good test for an IC that wants to jump to a manager, cross-team or especially sales role. Believe me, you don’t close deals by dunking on your prospects.