[hunter2_]

You're free to add additional prohibitions on communication as a house rule I guess, but the only prohibition in the rule book I've seen is that the clue giver's speech must consist exclusively of clues (and private consultation with the other clue giver). The clue giver is free to adjust their clue in reaction to anything they hear, and guessers can speak freely.

Important: the clue giver cannot acknowledge the instruction during gameplay. That would certainly extend beyond giving a clue! The guessers must know that their clue giver can play this way prior to the game commencing.

Edit: I just consulted the rules and this is the most relevant section:

> If you are a field operative, you should focus on the table when you are making your guesses. Do not make eye contact with the spymaster while you are guessing. This will help you avoid nonverbal cues.

> When your information is strictly limited to what can be conveyed with one word and one number, you are playing in the spirit of the game.

The author's use of the pronoun "you/your" switches from field ops in that first paragraph to spymasters in that second paragraph, confusingly. With that in mind, it boils down to this: field ops cannot seek non-clue information from spymasters, and spymasters cannot convey non-clue information. The strategy I'm suggesting involves neither!

[ALittleLight]

If you take this idea of communication restrictions to the limit, you could imagine the guessers identifying N sets of cards by a single word each as they discuss their guess. The clue giver listens, then uses the clue that identifies the correct set of N cards.

You really just need an algorithm to generate unique sets of 8 or 9 from the whole board, and identifies those sets by a word.

[groggo]

Yeah it's interesting to take these ideas to the extreme... even at the lower end I don't like it, I think zero communication outside of clues is the best way to follow the spirit of the game. But a little bit of banter and "kibitzing" is what makes it fun too.

[spencerflem]

I played in a Codenames tournament at CGE's stand at GenCon, and they forbid guessers from communicating at all. Officially, its supposed to be just the clue and number and nothing else.

Of course, I never play this way in my own games

[hunter2_]

How do guessers arrive at a consensus about what card to touch, if they are forbidden from communicating at all?

[spencerflem]

officially its a 4 player only game, at least at the tournament. I never do it this way myself though