How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?

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2024-08-12 06:30:05

About eight years ago, I was playing a game of Codenames where the game state was such that our team would almost certainly lose if we didn't correctly guess all of our remaining words on our turn. From the given clue, we were unable to do this. Although the game is meant to be a word guessing game based on word clues, a teammate suggested that, based on the physical layout of the words that had been selected, most of the possibilities we were considering would result in patterns that were "too weird" and that we should pick the final word based on the location. This worked and we won.

Ever since then, I've wondered how good a bot that plays using only position information would be (you might also call this an AI, but since we'll discuss using an LLM/AI to write this bot, we'll use the term bot to refer to the automated codenames playing agent to make it easy to disambiguate).

At the time, we looked through the configuration cards to see if our teammate's idea of guessing based on shape was correct, and it was — they correctly determined the highest probability guess based on the possible physical configurations. Each card layout defines which words are your team's and which words belong to the other team and, presumably to limit the cost, the game only comes with 40 cards (160 configurations under rotation). Our teammate hadn't memorized the cards (which would've narrowed things down to only one possible configuration), but they'd played enough games to develop an intuition about what patterns/clusters might be common and uncommon, enabling them to come up with this side-channel attack against the game. For example, after playing enough games, you might realize that there's no card where a team has 5 words in a row or column, or that only the start player color ever has 4 in a row, and if this happens on an edge and it's blue, the 5th word must belong to the red team, or that there's no configuration with six connected blue words (and there is one with red, one with 2 in a row centered next to 4 in a row). Even if you don't consciously use this information, you'll probably develop a subconscious aversion to certain patterns that feel "too weird".