Codenames: Critical Role Adventures

• Designers: Vlaada Chvatil and Felix Podlesny 
• Publisher: CGE
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 25 min/player
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Enter the world of Exandria, a land of infinite wonder and unexpected champions, and experience the Critical Role adventures through Codenames. Assemble a party of heroes from the first three Critical Role campaigns, embark on missions, and level up your characters to defeat the final boss.

Codenames: Critical Role Adventures is a unique take on Codenames inspired by the Critical Role universe. It’s a fully cooperative version of the game where one GM (game master) leads their party through perilous missions, each with its own twist and take on the classic Codenames rules and featuring a new set of themed words. Play the game in three separate campaigns, choose from seven Critical Role characters, and, by levelling them up, unlock new abilities and equip items to use during missions.

To set up the game, choose one of the missions to play, and the team chooses a GM (Game Master).  The GM reads the mission, explaining the story of the particular mission as well as the parameters – what is needed to win, how much time is available, and the benefits of guessing the special blue words.

The other players form the party, and they select 3 heroes to play – regardless of actual player count, there will always be 3 heroes in the game.  Each hero comes with an information sheet which tells you how many Hearts they start with as well as possible abilities that can be gained with leveling up.  The card deck is shuffled and a grid of 21 cards is dealt out.  The covering tiles are placed near the grid.  The GM draws a key card and keeps it secret behind his screen.    This card shows the pattern to be used in this particular round. 

Each mission is played out over a series of rounds – 

1] The GM gives a clue, a word and a number.  The word given relates to the cards that the GM wants the team to choose, the number tells the team how many cards are being targeted.

2] The team now discusses and makes at least one guess.  The team must choose which hero will make a guess, and the corresponding standee is placed on the card.  If needed, the team can use the deduction tokens to mark the information they think they know.  The GM then puts a covering tile on it and gives any penalties/rewards for that guess.  The gold and blue cards (on the GM’s key) are “correct guesses” while the gray/burgundy are incorrect. The black answer is an automatic loss if it is guessed.

• Gold: the hero gets 1XP for the guess
• Blue: these come with bonuses that are outlined in the Mission book
• Gray: incorrect guesses that cost the hero one of their hearts
• Burgundy: these words are the timer for the round, and if you guess one, that is one less round that the team will have
• Black: automatic loss

If a “correct” guess is made, the team can choose to keep going if they want and make another guess.  The first 3 guesses must be made by a hero which is not yet on the board.  Afterwards, any hero can make a guess.  There is no limit to the number of guesses that can be made in this phase.

3] Check the win condition – the GM checks to see if the team has found the target number of gold words in the grid.  If the team wins, the GM reads the win condition section from the mission book and rewards are doled out.

4] Advance time – based on the chart on the key card, cover the lowest numbered burgundy card in the grid which is still visible.

The mission is lost if a hero loses all their health, if the black word is guessed, or the stack of burgundy time tiles is exhausted.  The heroes will still get to spend their XP.

If the team wins, they carry their current health and XP counters into the between-times.  XP can be used to unlock abilities on the hero sheet such as more health or better dice rolls.  The team will also get to decide where they will go next on the map.   Coins can also be spent to equip the heroes with different items – these can provide one-time benefits as well as ongoing effects. 

My thoughts on the game

So this is a game that adds a lot of interesting architecture on top of Codenames.  Now, the goal is not to get your answers faster than the other team, but rather to get the right answers at the right time.  Each mission is set up with a target number of gold answers that need to be given.  There is still time pressure, but this time against a fixed clock – and one that can shorten if you make a bad guess and remove a timer card from the board.  There is some interesting strategy in trying to get the bonuses that the blue words give, but this has to be weighed against the added time it might take to get those answers.

Each of the heroes brings a unique special ability to the game, and clever use of these actions can really make a difference in a Mission.  Further, as you develop each character in the RPG-esque interludes, you can gain new or improved abilities as well as buy equipment to boost your chances.   If you’re not familiar with RPG-style games, don’t worry though – there is not an overwhelming amount of that going on… just enough to give you a little story and to develop the characters a bit.

In the end, you’re still just playing 6 or more games of Codenames to get through a full campaign map, but the added bits make it interesting and make each adventure varied from the others.   In addition to the changes that come from the heroes, each of the three campaigns offers plenty of branching points in the story, so you can play them over and over and see different cities each time – further increasing replayability/variance.

I’ve now played through three campaigns, and I think that I’ve figured out how I like to play it.  First, I prefer to play at any player count other than 4.  Why?  Well, when there are 4 people, it becomes natural for each guesser to take “ownership” of a single hero – and welp, in every game I’ve played, the heroes end up getting uneven play due to special abilities or what not. Which means that one hero almost always becomes the XP hog and gets all the cool things and becomes the most interesting hero to play.   

In order to prevent people from being stuck with the unloved characters, when you have a non-4-player group, it’s hard for people to have ownership. Further, our group has enjoyed rotating the role of cluegiver each round rather than keeping a single person as GM the whole campaign.  This also has helped make it feel more cooperative in nature.

Though we haven’t done it yet, I also think that future games may have us swapping in the cardset from the original Codenames.  The word deck has been made specifically with the RPG theme in mind, and there are plenty of words included that help increase the thematic cohesiveness.  But…. if you’re not big into the genre, it sucks to make/answer clues with board words such as “Natural 20”, “Faun”, and “Sun Tree”.  To keep the core gameplay working, I’d prefer to use words that everyone is familiar with – as this helps with more inventive clues.  Of course, YMMV with this.

I generally like word games, and I have always been a big fan of Codenames – and this newest version is a great way to get a favorite back onto the table.  I’ll never complain to play 6 or 7 rounds in a row, and the added RPG-ish features put a little bit of a story and framework to it.  The cooperative nature is nice, and the game always leads to interesting conversations/debates about the clues.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dan B. (1 play): I like Codenames. I played this as the GM and didn’t like all the extra stuff this adds to Codenames – sitting there while the players not only discuss the clues but also discuss the optimal way to use the heroes was quite tedious. Swapping out the GM for each set of cards, as Dale suggests, would have helped a bit, and I think that is what the published rules also suggest, but that would just spread the pain around more. (When we played we were told one person would GM the whole campaign, so we didn’t swap, but we only played a few sets.) 

Nate Beeler: At its core, this is a wonderful idea that really should have been a home run: using the Codenames mechanism to power a dungeon crawl, with characters that have special abilities and can level up. Chef’s kiss to the concept. I played it in an unfinished version at a convention, taught by one of the publisher’s team (very probably in the same game Dan was the GM). By the rules as we were told, players were neither playing as characters with fun special abilities nor were they swapping into the clue giving GM role to at least mix things up. The main group of us were just playing a group puzzle at arms length with a lot of added overhead. Our GM didn’t even get whatever fun was in that. It was most definitely not the immersive experience I wanted. Instead it felt like a weighed down version of Codenames with a crappy word set (we had to pause a round to look up what a word on a card meant, and it turned out it was the game world’s slang for ‘cow’). For me, and I think our table as a whole, it just didn’t work as written. I would like to try it again, this time playing as the characters, as long as we can find someone who doesn’t mind being the GM the whole time. The people I play games with are cool and are interested in everyone having a good time, so XP hogging isn’t a problem.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!  Dale Y
• I like it.
• Neutral. Nate B., John P
• Not for me…