First Impressions of Codenames Duet

If you’ve played board games in the last couple of years you may have heard of a little game called Codenames. It’s rather good. It’s rather popular! And it has spawned a regular tide of new versions: Pictures (much harder for me), Deep Undercover (sexy). Now we gain Codenames Duet, a fully cooperative version of the game, specifically intended for 2 players, and it has really mixed things up.

Ok, well it’s still Codenames. There’s a grid of words out on the table, you’re trying to find your (now green) agents and for God sake, avoid the assassin! But now, both of you give clues, and both of you guess!

To make this work, you have a double sided clue card showing the same grid, but with different information. Together, you need to find 15 agents spread throughout the grid. Each side of a clue card identifies 9 agents, 6 unique to that side (the other player sees these as neutrals) and 3 shared. Immediately this raises the question of why don’t you just pick the ones you know are green regardless of the clues? Because they don’t know that, and they put out the results of your pick based on what they see on their side of the card.

To handle those conflicts where they’ve placed a neutral where you know a green should go, the neutral tiles are just small markers you place to face the player who guessed it. The other player can still select it on a future clue, believing it might be green on the other side of the clue card. But this leads to the inevitable screw ups when you place out a neutral marker and assume your friend selected it because they see it as green. Some spaces are neutral for everyone!

To make matters worse, each side of the card has 3 assassins! It used to be hard enough avoiding accidentally pointing to one! And only one of them is shared – your assassins correspond to one assassin, one neutral and one green from your friend’s point of view. At some point, you are going to have to put your finger on a word that you think is an assassin!

Codenames Duet is a great twist on classic Codenames. It’s a little confusing to begin with, and I hope I’ve done a halfway reasonable job of describing how it works. The one issue you do have is down time. Because you alternate giving and receiving clues, everyone waits while people think up clues. This is inevitably worse than the original as the opposition team leader could often think of clues while the other team was playing. You obviously lose the banter between teams too, but this is designed with two players in mind and it’s a great way of implementing it. There are also rumours of an included campaign system for playing multiple games. I can only imagine where Vlaada will take that but I’m pretty excited to see!

 

This first impressions article is based on a demo at the UK Games Expo 2017.