Codenames Party Game

Two rival spymasters know the secret identities of 25 agents. Their teammates know the agents only by their Codenames.

In Codenames, two teams compete to see who can make contact with all of their agents first. Spymasters give one-word clues that can point to multiple words on the board. Their teammates try to guess words of the right color while avoiding those that belong to the opposing team, and everyone wants to avoid the assassin.

This is a very portable game you can play just about anywhere, anytime, and it works with just about any age group- most of the images are kid-friendly. You can run through a full game in about 15 minutes too. Many party games can seem simply silly, but both versions of Codenames need a bit of strategy and require some smarts. On one level, it’s similar to Taboo, but much less frantic since you don’t have to enforce any time limits while either creating the clues or guessing them.