Designer Diary: Codenames App, or My Biggest Project So Far…

by Vlaada Chvatil

Hi, I am Vlaada Chvátil. Some of you might know me as the designer of several board games…and some of you may be wondering what I have been up to in the past few years. Well, let me tell you.

While I’ve worked on smaller projects and also played around with various bigger board game concepts — hopefully, you’ll see some of them published sooner or later — my main focus has been working with the <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/7345/czech-games-edition”>Czech games Edition digital team on the Codenames App, a mobile version of my most successful tabletop game.

I have to say, it’s been the biggest and most demanding project of my life. Through the Ages? A piece of cake. <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/96848/mage-knight-board-game“>Mage Knight? A walk in the park. (Well, not really.) But those projects seem like that compared to the Codenames App, which is quite a contrast since developing the Codenames board game was the fastest project I’ve ever done!

If you’re not familiar with the Codenames board game but are still interested in reading on, here’s a quick overview: There are 25 words on the table and two teams. One person from each team (the spymaster) knows which words belong to their team and tries to communicate that information to their teammates (the operatives) using single-word clues. For example, if the spymaster wants to connect TABLE, HORSE, and KNEE, they might give the clue “LEG 3”, which means their team should find three words linked to “leg”. The first team to guess all of their words wins.

So, Was It Worth All the Effort?

Before I answer that, let me explain what we are talking about.

The Codenames App was released in mid-September 2024 in English and at the beginning of October in German, with more languages to follow (French being the first at the start of 2025). My friend Petr Murmak, with whom we co-founded CGE years ago, described the app as “Massive Multiplayer online Codenames”. When I first heard that, I thought: “Um…really?” Yes, there is character development and leveling up in the app, but we designed it to work perfectly as a solo experience, with the option (definitely not the need) to arrange games or connect with friends — but then I realized, actually, that’s a pretty accurate description.

MMORPGs also let you play solo, but in an environment shared with other players — and that’s also how the Codenames App works. At first, you explore it on your own, interacting with others only during games (since Codenames is still a board game meant to be played with others). But sooner or later, you come across a player you really click with, or maybe someone compliments your clues. You might join a conversation between players, and before you know it, you’re sending or accepting a friend request, or you’re getting invited to a friendly game. Soon enough, you’ve built a network of friends, and you’re joining the Codenames Discord, Facebook, or some other discussion group; you become part of the community. It happened to me, and to many others I know over the past few years.

Wait — did I just say “over the years”, even though the app launched only a few months ago? Well, in Czech, the app has been available for almost two years. This was our team’s first attempt at creating something this large, so we soft-launched it in our language to make sure everything worked smoothly. We also wanted to see how players would respond. And we were pretty surprised!

I remember worrying before the release: “This achievement will take at least six months to unlock; no one will play for that long.” Well, we were wrong. Not only did players unlock it much faster because of how much and how well they played, but many of them are still actively playing, even after 23 months. During the soft launch, we had to keep adding new content to keep up with their enthusiasm for unlocking and achieving things. We also got a better understanding of which features to concentrate on most since we were actively playing and chatting with players.

So, how does the app work? The core parts of the game are Daily Challenges, online Missions, and play with Friends.

Daily Challenges

I’ll start with the system we’re most proud of. The Daily Challenges might look like a purely single-player experience. The app regularly sends you batches of cases, quick one-time Codenames puzzles to solve. No obligations; solve a few of them whenever you feel like it. Some are easier, others more challenging. To give you an idea of how it works, I’ve taken screenshots of a few puzzles I received recently and really liked. (For one of them, I had to Google a bit, but I welcome opportunities to learn new things.)

Your goal is simple: Find the corresponding number of words that fit the clues. Feel free to try these cases yourself. (You may discuss your thoughts below the article if you’re not sure, or to help others.)

The better you perform, the more experience you gain (and more experience means leveling up, which unlocks new features and improvements for you).

Also, for each perfectly solved case, you earn a shiny medal (which brings you close to more achievements and more rewards).

You might wonder: Who designed all of these cases? And you’ll probably be even more curious when I tell you that our most dedicated player solved over 32,000 of these puzzles during the Czech soft launch.

You’ll start to understand where all these cases come from once you unlock Spymaster Scenarios in your agent career. Scenarios are less frequent than regular cases and might take a few minutes to solve. Your goal in a scenario is to choose several golden words and come up with the best possible clue for them. Here’s a scenario I had today:

I was thinking of giving a Greek-themed clue because of DELTA and OLYMPUS, or maybe something related to rivers for DELTA and WAVE, but then I noticed that WAVE, POINT, and SWING could all be connected as GESTURES 3, so I went with that.

The point is, multiple players get the same scenario, and they compete to see who can come up with the biggest and best clue. How do we know how good your clue is? Well, other players will receive your clue as part of their daily cases, and your ranking in the Spymaster competition depends on how well they solve your clue. After some time, the results are tallied, and players are ranked. It might look something like this:

You can see that my clue did pretty well — it came in second place and won a silver cup. From the fingerprints, you can tell that all the players who got it as part of their daily cases correctly guessed POINT and WAVE, though some chose MOON instead of SWING…which makes sense, in a way — mooning is technically a gesture! Maybe I should have gone with GESTURE 4. We could also check out the gold-winning clue, MOVEMENT 4, and see for which words it was and how it did.

Now it all clicks, right? When you play daily scenarios, you’re creating cases for others, and when you solve daily cases, you’re evaluating the Spymaster competition.

Oh, while finishing this article, I managed to win a platinum cup for a very well performing clue. I will use this opportunity to show you one feature of the app – sharing. If you click the share icon on your evaluated daily clue (the icon in the top left corner of the previous image), the app generates your clue as a solvable case you can share with your friends outside the app so that they can try it on their own. So, I am sharing with you — enjoy!

We want to motivate players to give their best when creating scenarios because the better their clues are, the more fun people will have solving the daily cases. That’s why placing well in this competition comes with huge rewards: those cups, lots of experience, and even some keys.

Oh, right, I haven’t mentioned keys yet. You’ll find them in both daily cases and daily scenarios, and if you collect enough, you unlock a mysterious briefcase.

This is the briefcase I unlocked recently:

I can pick one of these words for my personal collection. It was a tough choice; Fantasy is my largest collection, and GOLLUM would make a great addition, but I’ve also started collecting Movies, and THERE IS NO SPOON is a classic…so I went with that. Now, look what happened next:

I finally had enough Movie words to earn a collectible Movie figure, and I got invited to a Collectors’ Movie Mission!

This mission features words from my collection and from the collections of three other participants who also collect Movies. If my team wins this mission, I’ll get the chance to add one of the used words to my collection. YOU SHALL NOT PASS — you will be mine!

Oops, got a bit ahead of myself. It’ll take a little time before you reach Collectors’ and VIP missions. Let’s start with the basic ones.

online Missions

There’s no faster way in the entire world to start a Codenames game than by hitting the JOIN A MISSION button in the app. The matchmaking system finds you a suitable game within two or three seconds, considering your skill level and preferences. Not only that — it always finds you a game where it’s your turn right now. So whenever you feel like starting a new game, it takes only a few seconds before you’re either giving a clue or trying to decipher your teammate’s clue. After that, you have to wait. Unfortunately, that’s a core feature of Codenames — it’s not a fast-paced game. Finding the perfect clue (or understanding what your partner meant) takes time.

At the table, you’d just chat with others while waiting, but in online missions, you can’t chat before the game is finished. You don’t even know who you’re playing with as there would be no way to forbid sharing secret information with your partner if you knew their identity.

While waiting for others to finish their turns, you can leave that game for now and explore other things the app offers. Or, you can join another game. Hit that button again, and it’s your turn in a new game. If you still want more, you can do it a third time. Maybe by then, it’s your turn again in one of your previous games. Not yet? You could…oh no, don’t hit that button again, it’s a trap! Um, okay, maybe just one more game won’t hurt…or will it?

There were times when I had over twenty games of various types in progress. (If any of the more active players are reading this, they’re probably smiling. Twenty games is nothing! From our stats, we know that’s actually pretty average. Last time I checked, someone was playing over one hundred games simultaneously! Um, thanks, but twenty was more than enough for me. It’s up to each player to find the right balance.

These are my current games in progress — they’re nicely displayed on the app’s main screen.

You’ll notice the Movie Collectors’ mission I started recently. There are also some special games we’ll talk about soon…

As you climb the ranks, you unlock new modes and options. For example, there’s the Team vs. Assassin mode in which you and a teammate compete against an automated assassin. One advantage of this mode is that it can be much faster than a regular game since only two players are taking turns. Often, it’s over in just a few minutes because both players stay active in the game.

One of my fondest memories with the app is tied to this mode. I’m a night owl and work late. One night, around 2:00 a.m., I felt like playing a quick game before going to sleep, so I started a Team vs. Assassin match. Despite the late hour, the app quickly found me a partner, and we played. We did pretty well and won a golden trophy. As usual, after the game, I checked who I was playing with — identities remain hidden until the game is over — to write something nice in the chat. This time, the conversation went like this:

Yep, it was the first time I ran into my mother in the app. I knew she’d been playing (my kids had shown the app to their grandma), but it was still a surprise to bump into her in the middle of the night. She’s 75, active and sharp, but she had never played a mobile game before — and now she is one of the most active Czech players.

But back to the different modes. As you play regular and Team vs. Assassin missions, you collect invitations to VIP missions. These are Codenames games with different twists. For example, in some, spymasters can switch the colors of words in the grid. In others, operatives can use gadgets to help analyze the situation or avoid fatal mistakes. There are several dozen modes, but if you ask players about their favorite, most will give the same answer: Mines.

The idea for Mines came from Ondra Skoupý, my fellow designer and friend. (You may know him from his board game Letter Jam or the treasure hunts CGE organizes at Gen Con and other events.) It combines the principles of Codenames with classic Minesweeper gameplay, taking the experience to a whole new level.

You know what, instead of describing it, I’ll show you. I don’t have any Mines games in an advanced stage right now, so I asked Ondra to prepare a typical Mines situation for you.

The little mine symbols on the covered cards indicate how many words of the corresponding color are in the eight surrounding spaces. For example, the blue (2) on the card in the upper right corner tells you there are two blue cards nearby. Only one neighboring word is covered so far, so you know that either VIKING or RAIL is a blue word.

Well, Ondra is Ondra, so this picture is also a puzzle. You can try to combine the word clue with the spatial clue. It’s your turn, you are blue, and you’ve been given the clue SCHRÖDINGER 2. Can you find the remaining five blue words based on this information? It is not easy. You may need to check the discussion; hopefully, someone will help you out.

Mines is so fun that it has become one of the main reasons for the surge in friendly games. You just want to share this great puzzle experience with your friends…again and again.

play with Friends

In online games, several limitations are in place to keep things fair: you can’t pick your teammate (or even know who they are), you have to play on time, and there are strict checks to ensure your clue is valid.

But in friendly games, you can drop any or all of these rules. You can set up a game for specific people or open it to your entire friend list, and adjust some settings. In friendly games, you can also make use of your progress from other parts of the app — you can include bonus words from your collection and choose from almost fifty different game modes available in the app. (You want to unlock Mines for your friends, yes?)

For some players, play with Friends is the most important part of the game. Some prefer the online Missions and Daily Cases, but many just combine it…like my mother. During the first half year of having the app, she played mostly solo, except for a few games with me and my kids. But then, she decided to step into the friendly territory. With her permission, I’m showing one of her finished friendly games — golden Mines, the biggest Mines game with time-rewind gadgets.

You probably won’t understand much since it’s in Czech, so why am I showing it? To say hello and thanks to Lovisa, Otton, and Crowley. Over the past year and a half, my mother has played over one thousand games, many of them with these three players. She talks about them as if they’re her old friends, even though they’ve never met in real life. They found each other through the app, realizing they had fun playing and chatting together. (In friendly games, they can chat even during the game.)

Knowing that my mum has found such good friends through the app gives me a really cozy feeling. We expected most friendly games to be played among people who already knew each other, and while we hoped the app would encourage new friendships, I have not imagined it would happen to my mum. I hope there are many more stories like this out there!

So, That’s All?

Not even close! But this article is already pretty long, so I won’t go into more detail. Instead, I’ll just share a few more screens from my profile (and one from another player).

Upgrade choices: Whenever I reach a new rank, I get to choose an upgrade that improves some aspect of the game for me — or I can enhance an upgrade I already have.

•••

My achievements list: Each achievement gives you cool rewards (sometimes even new upgrades). But overall progress toward the number of achievements is also important — see that golden safe at the progress bar at the top? Just four more achievements and I’ll unlock it, gaining lots of additional rewards!

•••

Achievements also unlock animated backgrounds and avatars for the app. Here are my unlocked avatars. (In the Czech version, I’ve already unlocked all but the most ultimate one…but I’m close!)

•••

My Daily Challenges page: We’ve already talked about the cases (left) and scenarios (right). I’m showing this page because of another mini-meta-game shown at the top. I won’t explain it in detail, but let’s just say it’s something for those who like to keep their streak going, as in apps like Duolingo.

•••

Here’s what my profile page looks like to other players. The trophies on the shelf are for success in various game types, and the little collectible figurines on the cupboard represent my thematic collections (as you can see, my Fantasy collection is already golden). You can also see which other CGE games I’m playing.

•••

And here’s what it looks like when someone really plays. This player currently holds the top rank in the English app. I noticed him because in the first week after the English version was launched, he completed over 450 games; that was way beyond anyone’s expectations. I added DanFlashes to my friend list and asked for permission to share his profile page in this article.

There are also many subsystems designed to ensure players have a great time with the app — some hidden, others partially visible. For example, Rescue Missions let players volunteer to join games where someone has timed out or left, and Freeze Gadgets prevent usually reliable players from timing out.

Then there are the various matchmaking systems and the entire Jury system, which asks experienced players to vote on whether certain clue attempts — those not yet in the app’s dictionary — should be added. (Just a few days ago, I voted to add ARGENTINOSAURUS because it’s a legit beast our dictionary didn’t recognize, while rejecting MATEL due to a misspelling and FASHIONSHOW because it should be two words.)

By the way, creating and maintaining the dictionary (and the similarity checks — for example, when SUN is on the table, SUNFLOWER isn’t allowed, but SUNDER is) is an enormous task…and this work needs to be done for every language we add.

Oh, the Languages

It’s no surprise that Codenames is best played in your native language (which is why the board game has been published in about 45 languages).

Or is it?

I have to say, it’s been a valuable lesson for me. It wasn’t until I started to play the app in English that I fully appreciated the amazing work Jason Holt, our trusted translator, has done with the English words. The words he selected allow for truly creative clues, and you can almost always find a way to connect them. The multiple meanings in English are both powerful and deceiving, making it easier to find connections but harder to avoid unintended associations.

I briefly tried playing in German as well. It has its own unique charm and plays differently. While the basics remain the same, advanced gameplay changes — don’t underestimate the power of compound words! Any German players reading this? Here’s one case I encountered that would be hard to replicate in other languages:

And after two years of playing in Czech, I think I know all the tricks Czechs invented with our heavily inflected language that allows us to convey lots of information in a single word, such as NEMODRÉMU, which means “given to something of male or neutral gender that is not blue”. But mostly, over the years of soft-launch, I watched how the player base evolved. Now, most active players play the game very well (I would say brilliantly in many cases), and you may almost bet their clue will make deep sense.

When playing in multiple languages, you have a separate agent career for each one. (Switching between them is easy, with notifications showing if and how many games are waiting for your turn in other languages.) What’s more, Collectible Word Sets are different in each language – to feel exciting, they are tailored specifically for particular cultures.

For example, the second most beloved Czech word is KOFOLA, a Czech drink hardly known by any foreigner (except for Jason, the translator I mentioned earlier).

But well, some stuff works internationally. The most taken German word is HARRY POTTER, the most favorite Czech word is BRADAVICE (Hogwarts) – and HOGWARTS is also the second most popular English word, right after GANDALF. It seems wizards (and Kofola) rule the ladder!

So, Did All the Work Pay Off?

No, that wasn’t the question I asked at the start, but let’s start there.

Whether it paid off will be revealed in time. Across the three languages we currently offer are many enthusiastic players who love the app. They play actively, make friends, unlock content, keep streaks, discuss on forums — and write very nice reviews. (No kidding, we’ve got 4.9 stars on both the App Store and <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.czechgames.codenamesdigital” target=”_blank” class=”postlink” rel=”nofollow noreferrer noopener”>Google play — check for yourself!) Even so, there are fewer of them than we had hoped for. Development was full of technical bumps and took longer than planned, making it more expensive than we anticipated.

Like our other apps, Codenames is a premium product — you pay a few bucks up front, then you can play forever without ads or microtransactions. But each year, it seems fewer people say, “Oh, great, a premium app — how refreshing!” and more people say, “Paying for a mobile app? Outrageous!” Even so, we’ve chosen this path and hope we won’t need to change direction.

Another challenge is communicating everything the app offers in just a few words. Look at this long article — I still didn’t cover it all! We often hear, “Why buy the app when I can play the web version for free?” But when someone sits down and shows the app to them, we usually gain another happy customer.

Fortunately, the numbers aren’t that bad, which means we can keep adding languages, work on exciting new content (no spoilers yet!), and watch the word spread and more people find their way to us.

So, Was the App Worth All the Effort?

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know my answer. I’m confident it absolutely was. It was a fascinating project, and we created something truly unique — you won’t find a similar experience anywhere else.

Oh, it’s almost midnight, and my Daily Challenges won’t solve themselves. Good night for now! Whether or not you decide to join us, I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the world of Codenames App. And who knows? Maybe one day, we’ll meet in the game…

•••

Here are a few links you may try:

• A funny teaser we created for the app

• Our announcement video in which I show some of the stuff described in this article

• Codenames App official page



Source link