Dear Community,

I want to introduce you to very fun game we in Germany often play at national finals and IOI selection program (online). It is Codenames https://codenames.game/ You have to create room and select "create your own custom word pack!" and deselect the other pre-selected options which words to use.

Invite your friens who are chilling in the Discord Server and paste the link.

There are two teams, blue and red who play againist each other. First team to tap all own-color cards wins, team which accidentally taps black card loses. In the beginning all cards are turned around so no-one can see colors, only words noted on them. Spymasters (one person per team) can see color, operatives not. Every turn goes the following:

Spymaster of current team looks at the cards, gives hint describing one or multiple cards of his team, which are not yet turned around, and selects a number of taps his team in the best case will have (Then tap "give a clue"). Then the operatives will discuss which cards to tap. Operatives of other team can disturb and give false hints in the discussion. Spymasters remain silent, to not reveal anything. You can also mark cards you like to tap with your name/handle. When the teammates agree to tap a card, either it's their own color, they get a point and the number of cards left for them to win decreases by one, or they tap wrong card (card of other team -> other team's counter decreases + turn ends, grey card -> nothing happens +turn ends, black card -> team loses + game ends). The turn also ends when teammates successfully tapped number_spymaster_selected + 1 cards.

The most fun thing is the discussions among operatives, while others team's operatives are giving false hints. Also spymasters have to be smart and creative to connect the right words, i.e. give the best hint to their teammates, without directly mentioning one of the words. The words the operatives tap don't have to correlate with the current hint, they can also be for a hint given previously and for which they haven't guessed everything yet.

For example in the above game state the blue spymaster could give hint "slowsort — 2" and operatives could agree on blue cards "insertion sort" and "bubble sort".

What next?

Have fun and play together with your friends from Codeforces, people you know from different OIs or ICPC. Please create Discord servers and tell me and others about it, I'd be happy to join you! Also it could be played on existing servers, like Errichto's, it would be very cool if you'd try it out, organize or even play live on Youtube. The community will be more connected throught the game evenings! We in our organization BWINF have already played with Swiss OI guys, but are excited to play also with other European communitys in our timezone (contact me or in the comments).

The game is best suited for 6-12 people, and is a good fun alternative to Lockout.

Also, we need to extend the word list, so if you know cool new words related to CP, please write in comments. Current list is: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oelxj6vnbUkkuA2zCVnWQWZ1lJH1zuED/view?usp=sharing

Let's go!

Tagging other CP Youtubers: neal SecondThread galen_colin tmwilliamlin168 Tag other people who you know and you think they could organize something! There is also girls-only format if girls want to play alone to connect.

Bonus: You can play skribbl.io if you replace \n with comma in the word list file.