Czech Games Edition

You might know that this year CGE released Codenames XXL with plans for other XXL versions of the favorite Codenames family. You may like to know who came up with the original idea and who should be given credit for this.

Back in 2016, it was December 13^th, the CGE "Christmas" party was held and we invited all our colleagues, their families, our dear Czech partners and also manufacturer representatives. It was them who brought two super size Codenames boxes they made for this occasion, as a gift, after the huge success of Codenames that year when it won the Spiel des Jahres award (something like the Oscar of gaming, we could say).

There were a lot of little delectables inside of the first box, which we made empty immediately. However, the contents of the second box was much more important for our story. There were huge cards of Codenames, identical to the original game. It was such a great surprise and almost a little bit of spy work from their side since they used the data, which they already have, from the regular Codenames production - so they had all they needed!

We laughed and played it once, twice… many times that night. We shared this moment with you on our Instagram and it was a blast to read that people liked this big Codenames as well.

We started to bring this edition to various conventions. It caught attention and it was great for bigger groups of players. The reaction was nothing but positive. The bigger version brings many advantages which we featured in the previous article, the biggest one is better visibility of cards and accessibility to players, both elderly ones or smaller kids.

It was A-ha moment for us! Now you know how the story started and might happily end at your own gaming table.

P.S. (=Production Secret): Bigger space inside the box required special care for all those big components. We created the prototype of the insert in our office on a 3D printer first. It might be cool to have this 3D printed edition, but it's way too heavy. The manufactured insert will do the same thing for a fraction of the weight.