Codenames

I appreciate the developers making this a flat-sale game without subscriptions or microtransactions. But at the end of the day, it’s just not a fun way to enjoy Codenames. it’s too busy with tokens and sidequests, and finishing a PvP game with other players is insufferable. You’ll have 10 active games open and still have to wait half a day between moves. I would revisit if the devs cut out the “mission” fluff and implemented a 10-minute timer before a player gets bounced. As it stands now, I’ll stick with the board game.

So far servers will become unresponsive. iCloud and Game Center do not save your progress. If you want to chance this game make sure you “secure” your account to possibly have a backup of your progress.

I figured the multiplayer online portion of this game would be good, but I was hesitant about how the single player would be and wasn’t sure I wanted to spend $5 on the game. If that describes you also, and you aren’t sure about this game, don’t be. Every aspect of it is really well done. You will find yourself starting the game, thinking you’ll do just one or two quick missions/games before going off and doing something else; but before you know it, you’ve spent 30 minutes in the game doing all kinds of different things and you don’t want to go do something else. If you like Codenames, getting this app is a no-brainer decision. If you’ve never played Codenames before, get this app and you’ll be hooked.

The game is a lot of fun. The only Issue I see is waiting for people to play. I understand a few minutes of thought. I have been waiting currently for about thirty minutes for the other team to go. Having a day five minute timer and then the team forfeits.

We love the physical game but this might be even better. Extremely versatile. Can enjoy my full helping of Codenames with family and by myself.

Love the tabletop game; love how the app adapts using player input and has rewards for leveling up

Can’t click on words to select them sometimes as spymaster. Without that it’d be an easy 5*.

There are only so many terrible clues or missed guesses you can encounter before your faith in humanity is fully eroded. I finally hit the 90-day streak and am excited to take a break now. It's satisfying when a game moves along quickly because everyone is online and responding in real time. But generally you have to wait hours or days between turns, just to have someone choose "pickle" when your hint was "gladiator." The game is fine but people are trash and, well.... GIGO

This is the best conversion of a board game to app I've ever played. I like that the more you level up the more you get to do. Update: after months of playing the number of non-American players have made this game unplayable for me. Some players don't grasp the most simple cultural references. There should be an international option if you wish to play this way, but I should be able to choose to play with Americans that understand what I'm trying to convey. If you tried to play the real board game with people that didn't understand because they're not from this country it would be just as frustrating and no fun. Shame because this game was so well made.

Overall, I like this app a lot, and I’ve become addicted. But there is a major issue I’ve found with the way that spymaster scenarios are scored that is making them a lot less fun and violating the spirit of how codenames is supposed to work. If operatives select words that were on your team but not selected, it should not count the same as a bystander. It should count as one of your words, because it is one of your words (you should still lose “Perfect” points for it) It does make the scoring more complicated, but it needs to be done. As it is, it is incentivizing people to select more of their words for clues because they’re afraid someone will pick one of the words that they didn’t select, but that makes it much more likely that someone guessing as an operative will select a word that is not one of their words or an assassin and it’s just making the daily cases much harder and not as fun. It’s also not how a codenames game works (and not how the app works everywhere outside of daily challenges). A core part of being a spy master in Codenames is that you are evaluating the likelihood that someone’s gonna pick one of the words that you did not select and the penalty for that is different based on whether it is one of your words, one of the enemy words, a bystanderor an assassin. Daily challenges is violating that by making the penalty for selecting one of your words that you didn’t pick the same as selecting a bystander and that is just wrong. Also, the operative should not be stopped from guessing if they select one of your words that you didn’t pick. That’s another core part of how Codenames is supposed to work that I cannot think of a reason why that should not be part of a daily challenge. Again, I’m fine with you not getting the same amount of points if an operative selects one of your words that you didn’t pick versus one of your words that you did pick but you should not get penalized for it the same way as if the operative picked a true bystander. You could score it as the spymaster loses some perfect points and they don’t get the full hundred points for the pick so they lose points on both of those fronts but again it should not stop the operator from guessing and it should not count the same as bystander. There’s also a bug where probably about 20% of the time when I go back to the app it either crashes or doesn’t actually load for like almost 10 seconds and it’s stuck at showing the tip on the screen.