While I haven’t had the opportunity to play Codenames, the board game by designer Vlaada Chvatil, I’ve been seeing it everywhere I go and have had many of my friends talk about how fun it is. And now, it’s making its way to mobile as you can see in the video below. The game is all about trying to guess words from the clues given by your teammate. The spymaster (one for each team) knows the secret identities of 25 agents while his teammates know the agents only by their codenames. Each turn, the spymaster gives one-word clues that may relate to one or more words on the table, and the other players in the team try to guess which words the spymaster meant. There’s also an assassin going around, and if one of the players points to the card covered by the assassin, his or her team loses and the game’s over.
Codenames is not a complicated game, but it’s fun because you have to figure out ways to connect one-word clues with multiple codenames while making sure you aren’t accidentally leading your friends into the hands of the assassin or helping your opponents. The digital version of the game looks good, and because the game is all about minimal communication, it might work better as a digital game than other recent board game ports. There will be online and local multiplayer as well as daily challenges, and it overall looks like a very solid interpretation of the game. The game should be out at some point this year, so stay tuned for more.
[via BoardGameGeek]