9 great spy-themed board games for the budding secret agent

polygon.com:

Spying involves hiding and finding information, cracking codes, and deceiving others by concealing your true intentions. Those bits of tradecraft also make great mechanics for board games, providing players with the thrill of using their wits to uncover or share secrets without any risk of getting shot. Spy-themed board games are as diverse as espionage operations, ranging from fully cooperative narrative games that tell a story over multiple play sessions to fast-paced competitions where it’s hard to figure out who to trust. These are the nine best spy board games to play to test your potential as a secret agent.

The concept behind Codenames is simple enough that you don’t need any prior board game experience, but sessions are so varied that it’s impossible to truly master. Codenames is best played with six or eight players divided into two teams. One player on each team takes on the role of a spymaster who has to get the other players to make the right choices by carefully observing the game board and trying to think like their agents.

The rival spymasters can see a pattern represented in a five-by-five grid of tiles that forms the game’s board. Each tile has a word like “robin,” “duck,” “heart,” or “spring,” and spymasters provide clues by saying a single word, such as “worm,” along with a number indicating how many tiles the clue is meant to apply to.

The trick comes from how their teammates interpret that clue. A spymaster needs to sit stony faced while teammates debate if it’s more likely that worm is meant to represent something a robin commonly eats and the parasite heartworm, or if it’s there because worms are often seen after spring showers. Do ducks also eat worms? Guessing right puts the spymaster’s team