My mum’s given me a clue: “soup: two”. I scan the grid of words before me, hunting for a pair. There’s “bowl”, “fog”, “bowler” and “Europe”. Soup is eaten in a bowl – that’s easy. What’s the second one? My mind races. Is European cuisine known for its soupyness? The word “bowl”, of course, is contained within “bowler”. I go with those two: bowl and bowler.
I’m wrong. It’s bowl and fog. “Like pea soup! Fog!” she exclaims, unable to contain her frustration. I have no clue what she’s talking about: it turns out we are two generations divided by a common language.
My mother and I, like millions of other people across the world, have become addicted to Codenames, the biggest breakthrough board game of the past 10 years. The game has been likened to a crossover between charades and Battleship: two teams face each other over a grid of cards, each of them displaying a single word. Only the “spymasters” on each team know which of these cards represent secret agents, but to help their teammates expose them quicker than their rivals, they are only allowed to give one-word clues. The best players are able to come up with word associations that connect two, three, four or even more cards at a single stroke.
Teammates with an instinctive understanding of the lateral connections in each others’ minds tend to do particularly well at this: couples, siblings and best-friend teams have a natural advantage. But when the hints fail to register, like the “pea soup” fiasco, the mutual incomprehension can feel existential. I’ve heard people say it’s a great date game to suss out potential partners who really get you (and put a red flag on those who don’t).
Where simple rules meet complex emotions, Codenames has dealt a hand of spectacular success. Since launching in 2015, it has sold 15m units in just nine years, putting it on track to emulate modern tabletop titans such as Klaus Teuber’s Catan (40m units sold in just under three decades) and Alan R Moon’s Ticket to Ride (18m copies in 20 years). Available in 46 languages and a picture-only version popular with mixed-language teams of players, it has been name-dropped in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and gathered celebrity fans such as Andrew Garfield and Sofia Coppola.
After the launch of an app-based version of Codenames earlier this month, will Codenames cross over from word-of-mouth hit into mainstream, Wordle-esque ubiquity?
A large part of Codenames’ appeal is its simplicity. There are those board games, such as Terraforming Mars or Pandemic, which require big boxfuls of components or, to use the proper gaming term, “bits”: dice, cards, cubes, tokens, spinning wheels. Codenames is different. Invented by Czech game designer Vlaada Chvátil when he felt inspired to “try something out” after a weekend of playing games with his wife, it was conceived with a few scribbled words on pieces of paper.
“I tore the paper up with my hands – I didn’t even have scissors,” Chvátil tells me on a video call from Brno. He arranged his word confetti in a grid, and grabbed some cards from a different game. “That version is almost the same as now,” he grins with a bashful shrug.
Serious tabletop enthusiasts distinguish between “American-style games” – which are characterised by combative battles and a moderate to high amount of luck – and “Eurogames”, which are more focused on strategy, diplomacy and cooperation.
Chvátil, who grew up in 1980s Czechoslovakia, is often seen as a prime example of the latter, though he prefers to eschew labels: “I’ve always been drawn to the elegant mechanics of Eurogames and the rich themes of American-style games,” he says. “I believe that the two are not mutually exclusive.”
Raised on his father and grandfather’s handmade versions of Ludo and Monopoly (the latter “wasn’t accessible here”, he recalls), Chvátil immersed himself in the German-dominated Eurogames tradition when he and his Czech friends started to attend Spiel, the world’s largest annual board game fair and mecca of board game design in the western German city of Essen.
Eurogames can be cerebral, and while Chvátil’s first tabletop game, 2006’s Through the Ages, was high quality it was also complicated. Even admirers such as Patrick ten Hoorn, the co-owner of Den Haag’s board-gaming cafe Spellenhuis, describe it as “only suitable for board game geeks like myself.” His follow-up, 2007’s sci-fi spaceship-construction game Galaxy Trucker, was a similar hit in the board gaming community, but neither achieved the mass appeal of Codenames, which won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award – the most coveted prize in the industry – in 2016.
Part of what distinguishes Chvátil’s breakthrough hit from his predecessors is that while there is still a lot of thinking going on, you’re not thinking on your own but together. “With Codenames, everyone is thinking at the same time, there’s a lot of interaction,” says Ten Hoorn.
It’s not only social but it socialises its participants: unlike a game such as Wordle, it rewards not just those with the most extensive dictionary inside their heads, but those who can work their way into the jumbled lexicon in someone’s else’s brain. At the end of a session, you feel you know your teammates better than you did before: I’ve come to accept that my friend is more likely to associate the word “gladiator” with the word “popcorn” than “chest”, and that’s OK.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that Codenames’ astounding popularity can be traced back to the contact-free days of pandemic, when Czech Games Edition launched a free online version. The browser version now reaches up to 10m plays per month, 100,000,000+ views on YouTube and a whopping 18,000,000+ hours streamed on Twitch.
“I enjoy that you can almost create a podcast-type of environment with other streamers and players, as opposed to constant action and chaos” says LA-based live streamer Kara Corvus. Her live streams can clock more than 20k views on YouTube. Meanwhile, physical gaming continues to enjoy surging popularity. In Spellenhuis, two-player duets version of Codenames is a favourite on Tinder dates.
Codenames date-night activities are part of a broader transformation in board gaming. Once characterised by silver-haired men playing chess, draughts and backgammon in dusky cafes, the scene has shifted to trendy venues filled with younger and more diverse crowds.
As the boundaries between hardcore Magic cards enthusiasts, Dungeons & Dragons fans and casual players blur, Codenames has emerged as a perfect middle-ground game to unite different audiences.
For my part, I now know that pea soup fog is a term for thick London smog dating back to the 19th and 20th centuries. It tells me more about my mum, who was born in 1950s London. We all have different reference points based on where and when we grew up, the films we have watched, how old we are, where we’ve been.
Chvátil insists the app version will maintain this beloved human component of the original. People connect in real time with other players – no bots required. In fact, he says that an AI version would be “too perfect” at the game, sanitising the messy fun of it.
“Codenames isn’t about algorithms trying to understand algorithms,” he says. “It’s about people trying to understand people.”
