Codenames family game for 14 years

Product Information

Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. Let’s say the red team also had an agent under an animal-related codename; if the blue team mistakenly guesses that word, it uncovers an agent for the opposing team, which benefits the opposing team. Thanks to its at-home and lab performance, it is still a top choice in The Best Party Games for Adults despite newer models and options being available on the market.

Teams compete to make contact with their secret agents based on clues given to them by their teams spymaster. Find and flip the double agent card so that it displays the team going first and place it in the appropriate stack. This allowed for more productive brainstorming and resulted in better clues and guesses—as well as the occasional silly, laugh-out-loud moments. However, most will have better luck in a teammate role as opposed to the spymaster, since the spymaster has the challenging responsibility of coming up with the word association clues.

In addition to this original hands-on review, we also had the opportunity to test this product in The Lab. This setup allows for a new game board each time and ensures a fresh combination of words—something my family, and particularly my teenage son, really appreciated. Each team is allotted the same number of guesses as said by the spymaster and can use all of these guesses as long as each guess unearths one of their agents. This concept tends to lean toward silliness (and often hilarity), while Codenames falls into the more serious territory.

Overall, setup took us about a minute or two; my boys easily accomplished this on their own after a quick perusal of the rules.Details: Codenames is a fun yet challenging word game that works well in groups of up to 8 or more players.

Using the key card as a guide, the spymasters take turns giving associated one-word, one-number clues to help their teammates guess which codeword stands in for their team’s agent. I’ve found that the play of this game gets sillier and, oddly, slightly faster-paced with larger groups, so adding a few younger siblings ends up making it more fun. My kids love anything spy-themed and are avid readers, so I thought they would gravitate toward this game and the word association premise. The game contains a set of 200 double-sided “codename” cards labeled with, you guessed it, codenames.To make sure we are still recommending the best products for your needs, we recently reviewed this story to make sure it is still accurate and that we stand by what we wrote. The one word clues can point to multiple words on the board so the teammates must be careful to guess words of the right colour while avoiding those that belong to the opposing team. Additionally, the more we played, the more fun the rounds became as everyone starts to get the hang of the word associations, particularly ones that will provide clues to locate more than one spy at the same time.

Younger kids can certainly play, too, and they’re likely to be the group most attracted to the spy theme. Vocabulary and word association (and not to mention collaboration) all tie into the strategy of Codenames, and game time will definitely work these literary muscles. You can also find it as a featured product in The Best Cooperative Games, The Best Board Games for College Kids, The Best Board Games, The Best Party Board Games, and The Best Two-Player Board Games.Codenames was crowned the 2016 game of the year at the prestigious Spiel des Jahres awards in Germany. Essentially, the goal of this game is to crack the secret codenames of designated spies before the opponents can do so. On the face of it, it is a simple game yet it offers challenging gameplay and lots of entertainment.