While it’s nice to have the option to play as a duo, we found that this version eliminates the competitive component. 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.

My kids love anything spy-themed and are avid readers, so I thought they would gravitate toward this game and the word association premise.

Blue or red squares on the key cards indicate the location of agents for either the blue or red team, while pale squares are innocent bystanders, and the black square is the assassin.

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. 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.Codenames was crowned the 2016 game of the year at the prestigious Spiel des Jahres awards in Germany.

Since the team that unlocks the code to all fellow agents first wins, we quickly learned that it’s best to try and think of a word that can apply to several agents. In addition to this original hands-on review, we also had the opportunity to test this product in The Lab. My kids and I found that setting up and playing this game is much easier than it sounds, and there are online videos that some may find more useful than written instructions. Essentially, the goal of this game is to crack the secret codenames of designated spies before the opponents can do so.This concept tends to lean toward silliness (and often hilarity), while Codenames falls into the more serious territory. On the face of it, it is a simple game yet it offers challenging gameplay and lots of entertainment. Finally, there is one double agent card, one assassin card, as well as 40 key cards, which contain different color-coded configurations that correspond to the other cards (more on that next). 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.

Both spymasters should be seated at one side of the table, with their teammates sitting across from them.

If the players guess dog—or any codename with a fellow agent, even if it wasn’t one of the three the spymaster was referring to—they get to go again. 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. For example, if the blue team has spies with codenames “dog,” “cat,” and “turkey,” the spymaster might give the prompt of “animals, three. A spymaster draws a key card from the face-down deck and places it in the card stand in a random orientation so that it’s visible to the spymasters but not to the other players. Of course, there are rules regarding what spymasters can and cannot say—and there can’t be any hints or reactions to conversation or guesses.