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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to note that giving clues that are not about the words themselves is against the rules (and clues about position are explicitly called out in the rules as illegal).

The methods in the post are interesting, but technically against the rules of the game.

EDIT: Though I didn't figure out whether he means "clues about the position" or "clues about the words, until you can open enough cards to narrow down to one memorized position".

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If you've memorized all the layouts, you don't need any kind of clue, so you don't need a kind of clue that's banned. You could for example clue "Sausage" every time and your team would play as well as the bot in the article. To play better than the bot, you might want to clue about words for 1 turn or so.

Clues must be related to the semantic meaning of the cards, so irrelevant clues are technically banned. So, a "sausage" strategy would be illegal on many boards.

I guess you'd have to call an unrelated word and zero, which is explicitly allowed.

I would say that’s still against the rules since “sausage” has no relevance to the meaning of the target words. Obviously you could just bullshit some extremely tentative relationship if pressed but it goes against the spirit of the rules.

I feel like saying "<death card hint> 0" every time is 100% in the spirit of the clue-ing rules, and there's no rules related to guessing, so this guessing strategy also doesn't seem to violate things that overtly.

I do agree that there's an implicit intention in the rules that the operative's guesses are related to the spymaster's hints, but I don't think that relation is ever said explicitly.

But saying zero disallows your team from guessing at all, right? Maybe "<death card hint> 666" would work.

A common pattern in our play groups is when the other team is just 1 away from winning and you cannot find a clue that covers all your remaining words, you come up with the best clue you can and say "99" so that it's clear "The number is irrelevant to the clue here, just keep guessing until you win or you miss."

Edit: I'm wrong. From the rules: "If 0 is the number, the usual limit on guesses does not apply. Field operatives can guess as many words as they want. They still must guess at least one word."

Edit2: And instead of 99, my play groups should have been using "unlimited." Again from the rules: "Sometimes you may have multiple unguessed words related to clues from the previous rounds. If you want your team to guess more than one of them, you may say unlimited instead of a number. For example feathers: unlimited."

The rules specifically say that a number of zero means any number of guesses is permitted. They also say 'unlimited' is permitted instead of a number

Note that in the described game the spymaster didn't give out a clue like this; the article states "From the given clue, we were unable to [guess all of our remaining words]". I guess it was a teammate that suggested the other strategy.

You clearly don't understand the article since it's not about clues at all, but entirely about guessing.

Basically, the claim is that based entirely on the pattern of the board (revealed red, blue, and white cards), there are so few legal board configurations (the cards that the spymasters are using), that the field operatives can ignore the hint the spymaster gave, and guess correct cards anyway based on the board's revealed information.

Effectively, a game where the red team uses this strategy might go like this:

Red Team Spymaster: Word unlimited

Red Team Field Operatives: <pick card at random, get white at the lower right>

Blue Team Spymaster: <Real Hint> 2

Blue Team Field Operatives: <pick 2 correct cards at the upper left>

Red Team Spymaster: Word unlimited

Red Team Field Operatives: "Well, there's only one spymaster card with a white card in the lower right and two blue cards in the upper left, so now we know where every card is and can pick all the red cards" <wins>

In a real practical implementation here, the spymaster would probably actually clue "<death card hint> 0" each turn in order to ensure their team can safely pick at random until there's enough information to know which board they're on.

Please point me to the rule that bans this: https://czechgames.com/files/rules/codenames-rules-en.pdf

> "<death card hint> 0"

We had a game once where one team was starting to look at that card because of previous hints and the spymaster did exactly that to say "don't do it", but because the hint was for that card they ignored the number and picked it that round.

The fun of this game is in the absolute clowning that happens. This is fantastic haha.

If I was the spymaster in that story I’d just chuckle about how these games go, excuse myself to the bathroom, and scream into a towel.

> You clearly don't understand the article since it's not about clues at all, but entirely about guessing.

Not entirely about guessing. In fact, guessing isn’t involved at all, at least not after the first turn.

You left out that to do this, you need to have memorized basically all of the spymaster cards, or enough of them to increase the odds of you figuring out the configuration.

This is basically the same as the cheat in the memory match game in Super Mario Bros. 3 where you uncover matching power ups [1], and receive the power ups that you successfully uncover — but there are only 8 possible boards, so it’s way easier vs. this Codenames cheat.

Even if this is not technically considered cheating, it definitely would feel like cheating, since again you need to have knowledge of most of the spymaster cards. (And it goes without saying, this is definitely against the spirit of the game, even if it’s a neat party trick.)

[1] https://mario.fandom.com/wiki/Matching_Game

By "guessing" I meant "the guessing phase" as opposed to "the clueing phase", i.e. it's about the phase where you pick cards.

I should have said "picking phase", but from my example, you should have been able to see that I knew it was about memorizing the boards.

I feel like you've taken an intentionally negative reading of my comment, which I suppose fair's fair because I wasn't exactly being charitable to my parent comment either.

The rule for "unlimited" actually does cover it:

"Sometimes you may have multiple unguessed words related to clues from the previous rounds. If you want your team to guess more than one of them, you may say unlimited instead of a number."

You can't use "unlimited" as you're proposing - it's allowed only if there are multiple unguessed words from previous clues.

That said, the "0" approach isn't banned by the rules and would work the same way.

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