51–55 of 55 posts
Codenames is a word guessing game - in part. It's also a game of ingenuity, of knowing your players / spymasters, of players trying to be better as a group than as individuals, of paying attention (and using the other team's clues) - and at some point it's a game and can be played seriously and competitively. From that point of view I don't see a serious problem with embracing the game pieces provided and taking them…
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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…
> word knowledge was intended by the game designers to be a part of the game This is the most frustrating part of Scrabble to me. I consider my vocabulary to be pretty good. But frequently when I try to use an even slightly-esoteric word in scrabble, it turns out to not be in the official dictionary. And conversely, the official dictionary is full of words I've never heard or seen used by real people and often has so…
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> 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…
> Actually no they won't due to parity reasons! Can you elaborate? I think I can construct some boards that effectively have complete rotational symmetry. For the purposes of the game, black can be thought of as another white card (since you will never reveal it in the middle of a round), and the double agent can be placed in the center. Then, you just need to place the remaining categories with rotational symmetry (…
From the perspective of a player who is memorizing boards, it's beneficial to know which square is black, so as the memorizer's adversary it's probably best to put the black square in all 8 non-blue non-red squares for a given layout of blue and red squares.
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> Actually no they won't due to parity reasons! Can you elaborate? I think I can construct some boards that effectively have complete rotational symmetry. For the purposes of the game, black can be thought of as another white card (since you will never reveal it in the middle of a round), and the double agent can be placed in the center. Then, you just need to place the remaining categories with rotational symmetry (…
Double agent isn't a color that appears on the card. A card has 7 white spaces, 1 black space, 9 spaces of one color, and 8 spaces of the other color. If you think that white and black are separate colors, you can't make a rotationally symmetric 5x5 board. From the perspective of a player who is memorizing boards, it's beneficial to know which square is black, so as the memorizer's adversary it's probably best to put…
It's not difficult to be adversarial against the proposed naive strategy (just generate boards with enough overlap such that you can't uniquely identify them from such a small number of revealed squares), but it's easiest to generate fully random boards (without any concerns for "weird" boards) and be done with it.
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Double agent isn't a color that appears on the card. A card has 7 white spaces, 1 black space, 9 spaces of one color, and 8 spaces of the other color. If you think that white and black are separate colors, you can't make a rotationally symmetric 5x5 board. From the perspective of a player who is memorizing boards, it's beneficial to know which square is black, so as the memorizer's adversary it's probably best to put…
The reason why I claim that black is uninteresting for the purposes of board memorization is that if you are explicitly stalling until there is enough information to uniquely identify the game board, then either the black square is never uncovered, or the opposing team uncovers the black square, in which case you win automatically. It's not difficult to be adversarial against the proposed naive strategy (just generat…