4/29/2023 0 Comments Codenames duet![]() ![]() My husband and I really enjoy playing the original version of Codenames with our friends, so we also bought this version designed to enhance the experience for just two players (or more,) not knowing what to expect. ![]() It is also works fine to have asymmetric team sizes.Bottom line: one of the best word games around that doesn’t suffer from the poorly balanced oppositional gameplay of the original. It keeps the game moving along faster to have multiple people thinking of good clues and guessing. Players on each side can discuss among themselves (with paper or phones to keep quiet if necessary) which clues they want to give. Just have two teams of players on each side instead of 2 individuals. We just to try to finish with as few clues as possible.Even though this game is called Duet and designed for 2 players, it works great with teams. Due to the random difficulty of rounds I don’t find the “clue limit” mechanic to be compelling and I no longer play with it. The inclusion of more “death” words for both sides also makes the core mechanic more difficult and provides some threat of losing even in a co-op game. This shared fate means no team unfairly benefits from randomness: if one side has an easy layout it helps everyone win the game. This randomness in difficulty makes the oppositional nature of the original Codenames very poorly balanced: sometimes one team has a word layout so easy that makes it almost impossible for them to lose right from the start.Duet eliminates the poor balance problem by putting you and the other player(s) on the same team. Sometimes you get a devilishly difficult layout where you have to rack your brain just to make a tenuous connection between two words without leading your team astray. Sometimes you luck out with a bunch of words that are easy to relate and “death” words that are easy to avoid. The tension makes it really rewarding to winīoth the original Codenames and Duet have the same fun word association mechanic at their core, but I find Duet much more enjoyable because it takes away the terribly unbalanced oppositional team mechanics and replaces them with cooperative mechanics.The difficulty of a round of Codenames is dependent upon the random layout of words and your objective card. Some of the reviews I read on other sites think the difficulty is a little too rough, but we win proabably about 75%+ of our games, and most of our wins are down to the wire. In this edition, all but 3 of your agents are different than your partner’s, and one of your agents is an assassin for them and vice versa, which means you have to be really careful about making assumptions about what is a safe guess.This is our preferred way to play now. If you’ve played the original Codenames, you know the drill: give a one-word clue to your partner who then has to guess which word(s) on the board relate to that clue. We were pretty wrong about that!You can find way more in-depth rules reviews on the internet (and those are what caused me to immediately order this), but essentially you and a teammate are working against a built-in turn limit to find all the agents. We happened upon this at a local gaming store and assumed it was just some slapdash rules set to allow a 2-person game. My girlfriend and I both love the original Codenames, but it’s hard getting a whole group together to play. Haven’t gotten there yet, but sure am looking forward to it.Great fun for a date night or game night with family! Among the best! The real strategy comes in knowing the way in which your partner thinks and which clue words to use to get them to guess what they need to guess.The game also comes with instructions for more challenging “missions”. The usual play card is double sided so that each player can see the spaces that they want their partner to guess and avoid in hopes of reaching 15 correct guesses together.The game is great fun! Trying to relate words together while trying to avoid others can be a bit challenging. ![]() While trying to get your partner to guess off of the board, they too are trying to get you to guess off of the board as well. The partner then guesses at the cards which they believe the other player is hoping to lead them to through several rounds.The spin in this game is that each person is playing each role in time. The player then gives their partner a clue word along with a number of cards which they hope that their partner can relate it to. One player has a card that shows which spaces you are trying to get your partner to guess as well as those which you want them to avoid. Bought this game for a date night and it was a huge hit! Having played a few versions of the Codenames game, I was familiar with the overall concept but thought that this version had an interesting twist to it.For those unfamiliar with the concept of the Codenames games, the object of the game is to get your partner to correctly guess words from a 5×5 row of word cards. ![]()
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