Movies and TV shows lie to us.
Take the slinky, suspicious world of spies as an example. According to those Mission Improbable movies, there’s lots of action and you can run away from huge explosions that throw you into cars and off bridges and stuff and you’ll still get up and walk away from it in tip-top shape. Then there’s all the spy series where everyone’s dead sexy and saying sexy things and you can’t trust anyone, not even your own cat. I’ve seen the truth, however. Real spies look at 25 words and find something that might link a few of those words and they say it to other spies who are getting gradually drunker and everyone laughs at the stupid link the first spy made and the first spy pretends they aren’t hurt even though they want to stab everyone in the back for real. How did I find this out? I was given this super secret box with Codenames XXL written on it, that’s how.
This one’s a party game for 4-8 players split into two teams (depending on the state of your mates/family, this is where the first argument starts.) In board game terms, the Codenames series is pretty famous, but in case you’re new to it, let’s find out how to play (a note for those who have played the standard version: XXL plays exactly the same, so skip ahead if you wish).
How To Play
Two rival spy teams — Red and Blue — race to contact all their secret agents hidden in a 5x5 grid of word cards. Each card represents a codename for a person (Red team or Blue team) in the field. The catch? Only the team’s spymaster has access to the key code which reveals the codenames belonging to their agents, the codenames of the opposing team, the location of innocent bystanders, and the location of the game-ending deadly assassin. (I told you this is exactly like real-life spy shenanigans.)
Set up is super simple. Lay out 25 random word cards in a 5x5 grid (this can be a little anxiety-inducing for those who like everything to line up perfectly). Choose one player from each team to be the spymaster. They sit on the same side of the table, facing their teammates.
The spymasters share a secret key card that shows which words belong to Red, which to Blue, which are neutral, and which is the assassin. The key card also shows which team goes first, indicated by a colour code around the edge of the key card — that team has one extra word to guess (this can be a boon or a hindrance depending on how tuned in your team is).
The spymaster must study the grid of words and the key and give his team a clue. That clue is one word plus a number. The word should relate to one or more of your team’s codenames, and the number tells your team how many cards are connected to that clue.
The spymaster's teammates on the opposite side of the table put their heads together, mutter a bunch of wild theories, and then point to the card they think matches the clue. Get it right, and that word can be covered with the team’s agent card. If it turns out to be the other team’s word, then they get the point and the opportunity to heckle. If it’s a neutral bystander, the turn ends. Find the assassin and it’s curtains. Game over. You just got dragged down a back alley and shot with a silenced pistol.
There's a push-your-luck element in the fact that your team can guess up to the number given in the clue plus one extra if your group is feeling bold. This extra guess can help you catch up on missed clues from earlier turns, but can also scupper your chances of success. The first team to find all their agents wins.
How Well Does It Play
The critical elements for a word game are that it’s easy to learn and simple to play, and Codenames ticks both boxes. It sits on just the right side of simple/not so simple to learn when you’re trying to explain the game to three or more people who’ve never played it before, especially when you consider that this kind of game is most likely to hit the table around Christmas/special occasion gatherings with rowdy family members.
I found the gameplay to be surprisingly thematic. I think the word play element and the single word hint-giving suits the spy theme surprisingly well. Once players grasp the basics a lot of whispering and finger jabbing occurs, and the phrase ‘Told you so’ became a trademark amongst our group.
428 words should provide plenty of layout combinations, along with the 40 grids. This XXL version follows the updated 2025 edition rules: compared to earlier versions, rules have been tightened, words altered and improved, some art changes. I wouldn't know. I can say it's a smart package and a game that's super quick to set up. Within ten minutes of first opening the box you'll be deep into the game. It can be a real challenge trying to dream up clues that draw together as many words as possible, and it really helps if the rest of your team is on your (crazy) wavelength.
Codenames plays well at 4, great at 6, and I didn’t get to test it at 8 (not that popular, soz). It gets pretty hilarious, depending on the kind of lunatics you spend your life with. I strongly recommend playing this with the craziest people you know, the kind who think so far out of the box that they’ve forgotten what it looks like. Quick tip: if you don’t often get that many people together, or want to try it first, check out the Codenames App on Google Play and the App Store, it’s pretty darn addictive and a low cost way to play.
Bear in mind that there will be a glaring size difference between XXL base game tiles and expansion pack tiles, but I imagine CGE have already thought of this and have solutions on the way. (I hope there’s a solution coming: you could use the smaller cards if you wanted batches of extra words, but it would kinda negate the point of playing the XXL version.)
I want to pull up the hyperbole on the packaging, as there’s a bit of marketing spiel I take issue with. This claims to be a fast-paced game. I’m gonna say nuh-uh, particularly when people are first introduced to Codenames. Fair enough the rulebook itself mentions that it might take a while to warm up to begin with… but honestly, I haven’t found that games get much faster. I recommend patience with your spymaster. The usual process for a spymaster is to stare at the 5x5 grid of words, then look at their key card, then stare at the word grid again, then say ‘Um,’ then think they’ve seen a great clue, then open their mouth to speak, then hesitate because they’ve just spotted a problem, then say ‘Um’ again, then frown, then get that light-bulb look, and these last few steps can repeat quite a few times over until an actual idea formulates. This is how most turns go, no matter how often you’ve played. You could house-rule it if you wanted to by sticking a timer on the spymaster, but we tried that and it honestly ruined the game.
This isn’t necessarily a negative, it’s more of a ‘be aware’.
That being said, these stumblings can make for Codenames’ best moments. An example: amongst the 25 words available, we had dog, wolf, and dinosaur. Dog and wolf were red codenames, dinosaur was a blue codename. The red spymaster decided that he was pretty safe to use the descriptor ‘animal’ so that his team could get two points. They of course named all three - dog, wolf, dinosaur. There followed a 15 minute discussion/argument/wrestling match over whether or not a dinosaur counts as an animal. According to the spymaster, dinosaurs are extinct and therefore not real, and things that aren’t real can’t be animals. Amazing stuff.
Conclusion
So, if you already own Codenames this might not be essential - after all, it’s the same game. However, if you don’t have the original and you’ve so much as looked at it sideways, then this is the definitive version to get. The obvious benefit is for those of us whose eyes aren’t what they once were. Given that the game works better with bigger teams, the larger tiles make the game layout that much easier for everyone to see. It has a nicer table presence, and is a bit easier for sausage fingers to deal with.
I’ll add in one more encouragement to try: you might not like word games, fair enough. This is more about communication than the actual words themselves, however. It’s about how one person concocts an idea, and how their team interprets that idea. The more people you play with, and the better you know them, the more fun this becomes.
You should have a copy of Codenames ready to go in case of family gatherings or abrupt parties at your place that you didn’t agree to, so make it this version. There’s a good reason why this has sold 16 million copies across the series…
(As my standard copy of Codenames is apparently on ‘long-term loan’, Codenames Duet stepped in for size comparisons.)
