Adding to the list of related games at the end of the article, I recently played "Poetry for Neanderthals" and thought it was quite fun, although really once you've figured out how to trick your brain into thinking with grunts, it becomes easy quite quickly because then you tap into the primal part of your brain that prefers single syllables. But bashing people with the rubber hammer kept it amusing for longer than it probably should.
How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
#12I'd like to note that giving clues that are not about the words themselves is against the rules (and clues about position are explicitly called out in the rules as illegal). The methods in the post are interesting, but technically against the rules of the game. EDIT: Though I didn't figure out whether he means "clues about the position" or "clues about the words, until you can open enough cards to narrow down to one…
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.
Re: How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
#13I'd like to note that giving clues that are not about the words themselves is against the rules (and clues about position are explicitly called out in the rules as illegal). The methods in the post are interesting, but technically against the rules of the game. EDIT: Though I didn't figure out whether he means "clues about the position" or "clues about the words, until you can open enough cards to narrow down to one…
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:
Blue Team Spymaster: 2
Blue Team Field Operatives:
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"
In a real practical implementation here, the spymaster would probably actually clue " 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
Re: How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
#14I'd like to note that giving clues that are not about the words themselves is against the rules (and clues about position are explicitly called out in the rules as illegal). The methods in the post are interesting, but technically against the rules of the game. EDIT: Though I didn't figure out whether he means "clues about the position" or "clues about the words, until you can open enough cards to narrow down to one…
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…
> " 0"
We had a game once where one team was starting to look at that card because of previous hints and the spymaster did exactly that to say "don't do it", but because the hint was for that card they ignored the number and picked it that round.
Re: How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
#15I don't know the game that much, but ways to create random 5x5 grid seems pretty simple when I quickly try to think about one.
What about having 25 scrabble-like squares in a bag, and the spymasters pick randomly in the bag. Each square has a number from 1 to 25 that correspond to one position on the 5x5 grid, and one extra square is chosen to be the black square and shown to the spymasters. The spymasters have a pen and a piece of paper with a 5x5 grid where they can mark the information they receive.
(that is if the spymasters are not informed of the position for the other team, I'm not sure if it's the case or not in the real game. If not, it's even simpler: both spymasters look at the result of every pick, the squares are colored and the order in which they are picked is the order they are on the grid)
Re: How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
#16I've also thought about creating a Codenames bot: what if we could use semantic similarity to batch words together? Surely, this can be done using a prebuilt embedding model and clustering! After some failed experiments - it performed worse than I thought it will - I've googled the subject, and... it turns out there's a whole paper about ML and codenames :) https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05885 ( Playing Codenames with La…
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)
Re: How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
#17I don't know the game that much, but ways to create random 5x5 grid seems pretty simple when I quickly try to think about one. What about having 25 scrabble-like squares in a bag, and the spymasters pick randomly in the bag. Each square has a number from 1 to 25 that correspond to one position on the 5x5 grid, and one extra square is chosen to be the black square and shown to the spymasters. The spymasters have a pen…
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.
Re: How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
#18This is an interesting view of how random number based security is compromised for economic practicalities (though the meanings of "security" and "compromised" might be overstretched here). For completeness, I wondered how many cards would be required to give the complete set of patterns. If we number the positions in the 5x5 grid such that the top row has positions 1-5, the second row has 6-10 and so on, the grid po…
> 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 wh…
Yes, I agree completely - I realised something was off in an espirit de l'escalier way not long after I posted.
This is great news for my proposed box redesign!
Re: How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
#19I've also thought about creating a Codenames bot: what if we could use semantic similarity to batch words together? Surely, this can be done using a prebuilt embedding model and clustering! After some failed experiments - it performed worse than I thought it will - I've googled the subject, and... it turns out there's a whole paper about ML and codenames :) https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05885 ( Playing Codenames with La…
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…
This strategy is specifically banned by the rules: https://czechgames.com/files/rules/codenames-rules-en.pdf
I quote:
> Your clue must be about the meaning of the words. You can't use your clue to talk about the letters in a word or its position on the table.
You're talking about cluing about the position, so it's against the rules.
I guess the rules do also say:
> But if no one notices that a clue is invalid, it counts as valid.
which kinda maybe makes it legal, but it seems like it's quite against the spirit of the rules, and the "invalid" clue thing there is just stuff like "accidentally used a word that's a part of a compound word on the board", not maliciously trying to cheat the rules.
Re: How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
#20I'd like to note that giving clues that are not about the words themselves is against the rules (and clues about position are explicitly called out in the rules as illegal). The methods in the post are interesting, but technically against the rules of the game. EDIT: Though I didn't figure out whether he means "clues about the position" or "clues about the words, until you can open enough cards to narrow down to one…
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.
Clues must be related to the semantic meaning of the cards, so irrelevant clues are technically banned. So, a "sausage" strategy would be illegal on many boards.