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A game development log where I share the hardest game design problems, and share thoughts on the games I'm playing. My name is John Rudolph Drexler and you can find my games at catacombian.com
John (00:11.912)
Codenames is one of my favorite games and it is the kind of game that I strive to make one day. and here's why, is that it it it it lures you in because it looks like any other sort of party game that you might have grown up playing, boggle scategories and other things like that. Games that I genu genuinely enjoy, but they are sort of in this like category that we tend to think of as kind of lightweight, casual. It's a game that you can teach your elders.
Dad, and also your eight-year-old nephew, and get everyone together, and you can play it with a group of any size, and so it lures you in to thinking this is gonna be a simple and lightweight experience. And then you have this experience that I've had over and over, which is that somebody new comes to play the game and they say, I want to be the clue giver. this sounds it sounds more fun to be the clue giver than the clue guesser. let me give it a shot. And then they sit down and they see the shape of the problem and
They start figuring out their first move and they look up and they go, This is hard.
And that is just this wonderful experience I've had and I keep on thinking about why is it hard? what is so like sophisticated and interesting about this problem of the clue giver in code names. Let me give like a thirty second version of just like what this is, in case there's like two of you who don't know how codenames works. it's really simple. You lay out a grid of clues, there's probably
Let me just give a quick summary of codenames if there's like two of you who haven't already played. it's really simple. This is codenames pictures, which is different, where you use pictures instead of words. But in regular code names, these are words. It's even kind of better. You just lay them out in a grid. Some of them belong to red, some of them belong to blue, and the clue giver has to give one word clue to say, you know, here's the kinds of things you should be guessing, and here's how many things it applies to. And so they could
John (02:15.791)
could say like animal three and you might pick like this and this and this and that would be you know hopefully correct. but they have this little grid right here that tells them the answer key that tells them, you know, what are the what are the red items that we're supposed to be prompting them towards, right? So really simple, takes about less than a minute to understand, but then you get up there and you say, I have to give a clue that prompts them towards certain things and not towards other things.
And what they start to realize is that actually what the game is asking you to do is design a small puzzle, right? you're decid you're designing a little puzzle where you have to kind of boil all of this information, you have to synthesize all this information down to just one word, a one-word clue, and a number of how many things it relates to. And you can do something that's really safe that only relates to one clue out there or one or two of them, or you could do something that's risky and tries to tie together a bunch of them. But in order to do that.
That you have to reach for increasingly sort of like abstract or metaphorical ideas in order to tie together four different things while risking that your team will misinterpret you and go select the wrong thing and make you lose the game. this is a kind of weird and abstract communication that is so seems so simple, but is in fact very, very difficult to do. And I think what makes this such a huge and expansive.
And interesting game is that you have to think through like what is the source material that I can draw on in order to give them a clue, right? So you're not just thinking through, you're not just like r rifling through kind of your own head of like how do I think these things are connected. You're also trying to think, does the person on the other side of the table also see it that way? Can I communicate that with a single word? Which is very, very difficult. And it makes you think about
What is my shared understanding with the people on the other side of the table? Like if the people on the other side of the table is my young nephew, I'm gonna give a very, very different clue than if it's, you know, five strangers who are adults at a board game store, right? There's different shared source material that I have with one person versus those five people who are different age. I have a different relationship with them, maybe I don't know them at all. And so the kind of like if I say sort of like animal thread.
John (04:45.328)
That's a generic thing that could work for a lot of people, but if I were to make some sort of like movie reference or something to these adults, that might not work so well with my nephew. So you're really thinking dynamically about like what is this in my head, what is it in their head, what could they understand that that that I'm I can get across to them.
crazy example of this was one of the first times I played Codenames, I was sitting on the other side of the table from my parents and I just sort of magically in this like amazing random moment I got this all the clues that I was supposed to have them hit were all tied perfectly to this one story of this guy who we knew. and it almost like the if you followed the words around the board it almost told the story of this guy in just this perfect
way and I said the guy's name and seven. I was like, you can get seven of these clues by j by just going off of this one guy's name and they figured it out. And it was this like miraculous thing that could only happen with this particular set of three people, right? It was the three of us who knew the story. If you'd even replaced my mom with my sister who didn't know all the details of that story, it wouldn't have worked.
The unique shared experiences and shared vocabulary of the clue giver and the clue receivers is this dynamic, weird shifting, like shared source material from which you get to make these little puzzles. And then the game asks the clue giver, design a puzzle based out of that extremely large and kind of ambiguous blob of shared source material go.
Turns out that's a really hard and sophisticated thing to ask a player to do, and that's part of what makes this game so difficult and engaging and expansive. And if you play with a different set of people with the same exact clues, you would get a totally different game. This is sophisticated game design stuff. It's really subtle. And the kind of connections that you end up making end up being increasingly like abstract and poetic and metaphorical. And that is a kind of gameplay that is not
John (06:57.162)
easy to achieve, particularly in a simple family game that you can get at Walmart. And it boils all the sophistication down again into a gameplay that takes about a minute to learn. All you gotta do is say a word and a number, right? That's their whole turn. There's nothing more to it, right? It's so simple. But no, there's all this depth and there's all this sophistication to that gameplay. I think a lot about the
ratio of mechanical weight in a game, all the things you have to learn, all the stuff that's in the box, all the rules, all the exceptions, all the edge cases, versus the depth and meaning of play. And this is a simple heuristic I use to think about how good a game is a lot of the time. codenames is off the charts with this. The mechanical weight is as close to zero as you can get. And I think the
expressive gameplay, the expansive gameplay, the the dynamism, the sophistication is off the charts high. And this is why I think there's honestly an argument to be made that Codenames is the best board game ever made. You can compare it to something I don't want to just dunk on this, but a game like Gloomhaven, a game that I did enjoy playing. I have I don't have anything strictly against it. But Gloomhaven is this mechanical behemoth. I the box alone is
twenty pounds. It takes an hour and a half to set up. it's it takes five hours to play. You have to teach new people every time they come in and like I we had people coming and going out of our group. We had to reteach it over and over. We'd we would lose a set and we had to replay the five hour game. So much to learn, so much to keep track of, so many pieces, this giant box. The mechanical weight is like maximalist.
It's a good game. It's cool. I did have a meaningful experience. I I really enjoyed playing it and there was some cool, deep, meaningful interactions we had, some cool memories that we made. It was very engaging. But it's like, what did it cost us to get there? It cost us something very, very extraordinary to get that meaningful experience. Whereas Code Names appears to be able to deliver this reliably in a fifteen-minute game that takes one minute to teach, and that just blows me.
John (09:17.456)
That is the kind of thing that I want to make. That is what I strive to do. Simple but deep. Simple but sophisticated. Something that lures players in and they see a little problem and they go, I can do that. Let me be the clue giver. This is what I'm trying to do with Mudlarks right now. Lure people in with a game that looks like a simple family game. You play a couple rounds and you go, Hold on, this is a lot deeper than I thought it was. Hold on. Now you're doing something smart over there and I have to keep up. This is what I'm aiming for.
here's to you code names. Thanks for making one of the greatest games of all time.