I find the game more about reading the people on your team (and the other team) to understand how they think.
You have to give entirely different clues depending on the people you play with.
Sometimes you can also play adversarial and introduce doubt into the opposing team by giving topic-adjacent clues that cause them to avoid one of their own cards. It works better if someone on the other team tends to be a big doubter. It also can work when the other team constantly goes back and tries to pick n+1 cards that they think they missed from the last round, which gives you a lot of room to psychologically mess with them.
Sometimes you have a clue that only really matches 2, but because only 1 of the wrong matches is a neutral card and you could match 2 more by a massive stretch, you say “4.” Worse case, they get 2 right but then they pick the neutral card but in the best case, you stand to gain 4 for a clue that should only match 2.
I like Codenames because they are many meta ways to play the game. What makes Codenames unique is that, unlike a lot of other games (Catan, Secret Hitler, CAH, etc.), it’s an adversarial team game where the team dynamics and discussions are not secret so you can use them to your advantage.
You have to give entirely different clues depending on the people you play with.
Sometimes you can also play adversarial and introduce doubt into the opposing team by giving topic-adjacent clues that cause them to avoid one of their own cards. It works better if someone on the other team tends to be a big doubter. It also can work when the other team constantly goes back and tries to pick n+1 cards that they think they missed from the last round, which gives you a lot of room to psychologically mess with them.
Sometimes you have a clue that only really matches 2, but because only 1 of the wrong matches is a neutral card and you could match 2 more by a massive stretch, you say “4.” Worse case, they get 2 right but then they pick the neutral card but in the best case, you stand to gain 4 for a clue that should only match 2.
I like Codenames because they are many meta ways to play the game. What makes Codenames unique is that, unlike a lot of other games (Catan, Secret Hitler, CAH, etc.), it’s an adversarial team game where the team dynamics and discussions are not secret so you can use them to your advantage.