FAQ

How do I play?

• If you don't know the rules to codenames, you can check them out here.
• First off, you must have a channel set (i.e. anything in the url after "/").
• Get everyone on the same game either by copying the url or using the provided QR code.
• Choose your teams and spymasters and have everyone select the appropriate roles.
• When everone's ready, someone needs to hit the "Start" button.
• The spymaster of the first team will enter their single word clue in the text input that appears only for them and select the number of words they're trying to clue. Then hit "Give Clue" let their team's operatives guess.
• When guessing if that team makes a mistake, the game will automatically progress to the next team's spymaster. If they correctly guess the number of words clued YOU ALWAYS GET A BONUS GUESS and if you don't want to use it YOU MUST CLICK THE "End Turn" BUTTON.
• Note that the history of clues and guesses will appear on the left hand side if the window is large enough. If not, you can either hover over the red and blue numbers in the upper left corner or change the zoom level of you browser until it appears.
• The game ends in one of three condidtions.
  1. One team finds all of their words.
  2. The Assassin is guessed.
  3. One team runs out of time.
• That's it! Have fun!

I appear to intruding on someone else's game. How do I start my own?

You can change the channel either by removing the current channel from your url and navigating to https://codenames.marplebot.com or going to the setting menu (hamburger icon) and editing the channel there and clicking the "Set Channel" button.

What does a clue of 0/∞ mean?

0 and ∞ are functionally the same. They mean that the operatives get an unlimited number of guesses. In reality, they allow the spymaster to give extra information. So ∞ really means, I'm desperate and the clue I gave refers to at least one word. And 0 means, I'm even more desparate and I need you to guess the rest but avoid at least on word pertaining to the given clue.

What's up with "Both Spymasters" and "Both Operatives"?

Spymaster and Operatives actually have the same information, so for cases where people want/need to share computers you only need at most two.

I don't see the same game as my friends. What gives?

Make sure that you're both using the same url. You can either change it manually or go to the settings page (hamburger menu) to change it.

How do I turn the timer off?

Go to the settings menu (hamburger icon). Then just uncheck the Timer checkbox. It will propagate to the current game. Do not click "Reset Game" unless you want to start a whole new game.

How do I change the words?

Just provide a url to the word list in the settings menu. The game will then parse the file it gets an look for strings of letters with up to one space in between (to allow for clues like "NEW YORK").

You can for example make a google sheet, make it readable to anyone with the link, input the link to access it as csv in the "word list url" in the settings menu, hit "Reset Game", and the words from your sheet will appear in the game!

Tell me about this app

I made the initial version of this website several years prior to all this not long after codenames was originally released. Fast forward to the COVID-19 quarantine era and my friend encouraged me to make it more widely avaible as it seemed better to her than other codenames inspired apps she had encountered. So I decided to clean up a few things and make it more scalable. The two main pieces of tech it relies on are Firebase for syncing game state and Angular 1.x.

Who are you?

My name is Adrian Marple. I'm an indie game dev and I've released a first-person puzzle game on steam called Obversion. Feel free to contact me at adrian@marplebot.com with any feedback or whatever.