Cabinet 09

Codenames

or

Create a lobby and send the link. Four players at least: a spymaster and an operative on each side. The key lives on the server and only the two spymasters are ever sent it.

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How Codenames works

Twenty five words are on the table. One of them is the assassin, seven are bystanders, and the rest belong to the two teams: nine to whoever starts, eight to the other side. Only the two spymasters see which is which. Their job is to walk their operatives onto their own words without walking them onto the assassin.

The clue

On your turn as spymaster you give one word and one number, and nothing else. The word is what the cards have in common, the number is how many cards you mean. Wanting to point at ELEPHANT and LION you say "africa 2". You are allowed to say where the stress falls in a word if somebody asks. That is the entire list of things you may say.

What a clue may not be

  • The clue must be about what the words mean. Not their spelling, not their first letters, not where they sit on the table. LEEK, LINEN and LION cannot be clued as "l 3" or "three 3".
  • No matching endings, suffixes or prefixes unless the meaning matches too. "little man" and "little mushroom" are related, they both name small things; "resurrection" and "opinion" are not.
  • No clue that shares a root with a word still face up on the table. "port" is out while SPORT is on the table, but "child" is fine for GRANDCHILD, since the roots really are the same one.
  • Letters and numbers are allowed when they are about meaning: "eight 2" for SPIDER and NUMBER is a fair clue. Using the clue number itself as the clue is not: "citrus 8" for LEMON and OCTOPUS is out.
  • No invented words, no deliberate misspellings, no nudging with capital letters. For MOON and FABLE, "APOLLOgy 2" is out.
  • A clue in another language must not share a root with a word on the table through a direct translation.
  • Acronyms are allowed, and every rule above applies to what they stand for as well.
  • The number is 0 to 9. Zero means the clue is a warning, and your team may name as many words as they like.

Guessing

Your team names words by clicking them. Your own colour keeps the turn alive; a bystander or an enemy word ends it on the spot; the assassin ends the game and you lose. You get one guess more than the number, so a team clued "africa 2" may name three words, and you must name at least one before you can pass. Turn over all your own words first and you win.

Everyone has to agree

A click is a vote, not a guess. Every card carries the number of operatives on your team who have picked it, and it only turns over once all of them have picked the same one. Clicking your own pick again takes it back. A team of one operative is unanimous by itself, so nothing changes for them. Teammates who close the tab stop being counted.

A clue against the rules

A machine cannot judge a root or a rhyme, so the other spymaster calls it. If they do, the offending team's turn ends immediately, and the spymaster who called it turns over one of their own team's words before giving their next clue.

Why the server deals

The key never reaches an operative's browser. The room lives in a Durable Object that owns the words, the key and whose turn it is; the page sends intents and draws whatever comes back. Reading the page source, the network tab or the console gets an operative exactly as far as reading the back of a card: nowhere.