The one time I tried it out, the game experience was poor for all involved. To combat this, the game does include a sand timer, but we opted against using it since it added too much pressure to such a casual game. However, this isn’t to say that the game is bad at a larger group count, but I had some instances where the game felt sluggish and somewhat frustrating since people argued about what clues meant. This keeps the game’s time shorter and more streamlined. I’d say the best experience is at 4 players so that each team has one clue giver and one guesser. So far, I’ve played the game at 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 players. This adds a lot of outside variety on top of the already impressive variety contained within the box. While in another group I’ve played with, the clues given centered around historic events and inside jokes. In one group, our clues are more literary and media focused. The experience varies depending on who is playing with you as well.
I’ve found that the game takes a whole 5 minutes or less to teach and the first game takes about 10-20 minutes to play depending on the group of first-timers.Īfter that, people tend to grasp the concept of the game fairly rapidly and each game takes closer to 15 minutes in total with little to no downtime between games. Teaching the game to new people is fairly easy, which means that there isn’t much time wasted by rule explanation when playing this game. Big thanks to them for allowing me to use their videos as well.įrom the video, it is obvious that Codenames isn’t a very difficult game to learn how to play.
Check out Watch It Played for other great board game tutorials and game play videos.