Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We are big fans of Codenames, but find ourselves playing a lot of games just the two of us. The original Codenames has a two player option, so why buy this? In the original game, the two player option is sort of like playing against a ghost team. One player is the code master and the other is the agent and after each turn, you give your invisible opponent a point and start the next turn. That's fun, but feels more like practice. In this version, which you can mix with your original game for a much bigger pool of agent names (words), each matrix card is double sided and each player has their own secret agent list. You alternate being the code master and being the agent on each turn. There are 15 agents in each game, 6 that are unique to each player's side of the matrix card and 3 that over lap. There are also multiple assassins that may or may not overlap with each code master. Many innocent bystanders and sometimes even an assassin on your matrix will be a contactable agent on your partner's matrix, so you have to make sure you completely ignore your own matrix while you are guessing and contacting agents. To shake things up there is a pad of sheets that have a map of the world with multiple cities and a pair of numbers, like Berlin 11-2 or Monte Carlo 9-0. You can play a much more challenging game, working your way around the world. After each turn of guessing and contacting agents, the guessing player takes a timer token, which is a green folder on one side, indicating you completed your turn without contacting an innocent bystander or assassin, or a gray innocent bystander on the other side (I love that two of them are a dog and a snowman). If you contacted an innocent bystander, you place the token on that word card with the arrow facing towards you, indicating that the word is out of play for you, but may still be an agent for your partner. If you guessed only correct words, whether they were the ones your partner intended or not, you place the chip green side up in front of you to indicate that a turn was taken. So here's what the numbers to mean: in Berlin, you get a total of 11 timer chips (turns) and only two of them are allowed to be contacts with an innocent bystander; in Monte Carlo, you get 9 green folders and no innocent bystanders. If you contact too many innocent bystanders, you might as well have contacted an assassin because your game is over. It adds a lot to the game because you now have a goal to try to get through all of the cities instead of just playing the same game every time. It can be pretty stressful to see your pile of timer chips shrinking while your pile of agent cards doesn't seem to be shrinking fast enough because you just can't find a clue that links multiple words together.