Use the Team Chat to discuss with your team mate(s) what the other teams' secret words could be.

Giving Clues

Giving clues is the most fundamental part of the game. After all, guessing clues is all about reverse engineering the cluegiver's mind! Let's first establish the three kinds of clues that there are:

• Vague Clues - These are clues that are meant to give opponents as little information about your word as possible, but tend to contribute to an obvious theme when several get paired together. An example is SOUND for VIOLIN.
• Specific Clues - These clues are specific to the word. In the short term, they are hard to guess, but heavily narrow down the word in the long-term. An example would be STRING for VIOLIN.
• Misleading Clues - These tend to also be specific words, which completely give them away once revealed but can trick the opponent into guessing another word. An example would be SMALLEST for VIOLIN.

Almost all viable clues fall under one of the three categories above. None of them are inherently good or bad - each of them have different situations when to use them. And that's the key: Knowing when to give clues is better than thinking that any single clue is clever or not. Often, the best clues aren't the flashy ones, but the ones that your team can guess easily while denying lots of information to the enemy.

PRINCIPLE #1: Know when to use each each type of clue.

To know when to use each type of clue, the most important idea is to know what your goal is. Don't think of clues as standalone units: think about them in relation to the other clues that have been given and how it will affect your teammates giving clues. Don't be selfish! Prioritize giving clues that give your team freedom and less stress over making that flashy combination of words that makes you individually look good.

As a general principle, use Vague Clues in the beginning, Specific Clues later in the game, and Misleading Clues when you're running out of options to stop interceptions. Vague Clues are generally better than Specific Ones that aren't meant to mislead, but there are circumstances where specific ones are viable (such as if you have two similar words).

Oftentimes, the exact same clue could be brilliant or horrible for your team depending on when you make it. But to understand what makes a clue well-timed, it's important to understand what your goal is and what stage of the game you are in. Here's an example of a clue that is good in one situation and bad in another:

Example of a poorly timed clue: Let's give an example. Let's say your words are OCTOPUS, COW, CALCULATOR, and STAR and you're the first person to move. Remember, at this stage of the game, your goal should be to give vague clues that give your team flexibility in the long-term.

You give the clue "EIGHT" for OCTOPUS, thinking that you can later mislead the opposing team with CALCULATOR later.

In the short term, it may seem like a clever hint - after all, EIGHT seems nothing like OCTOPUS, right?

The problem is, you're not thinking about how your clue affects the game in the long-term. When your teammate tries to give a clue for that word next turn, what options do they have to not spoil the word? An otherwise vague word like "WATER" or "GRAB" would instantly give the word away to the other team - there are very few clues that work with the word 8 after all, and most of your opponents could easily spot the connection to octopus.

Example of the same clue, but timed better: Let's now think of that same clue in another context. It's late in the game, and you and your opponent have one intercept. You just need to trick them once because you have a firm idea on their words. Your clues for OCTOPUS are GRAB, ROUND, and GOURMET, and while clues for CALCULATOR are BUTTON, TIMES, OFF, and BITS.

Giving the same clue - EIGHT - would be great in this circumstance! The opponent would mix up those words and give you just enough time to snag the win. The point is, what makes a clue good isn't about what word is the least related in the short term, but what clues give your teammates the flexibility to make their own clues without making them easily guessable.

• PRINCIPLE #2: Give clues that are good, not clever.

While your team might hype you up for making a clue that's clever, what happens most of the time is that either your team doesn't understand them and you receive a Miscommunication, or you feed way too much information to the opposing team because you prioritized making clues that sounded clever over clues that effectively obfuscate your words. Even if clues seem vague, remember that trying to pair up clues for cleverness together reveals information about other words that you don't know.

• PRINCIPLE #3: When it comes to misdirection, know which words your opponents have a general idea of, and which ones your opponents have a specific idea of.

It's almost impossible to misdirect your opponent on a word that they know exactly, because a word that they know that would also confuse them is very likely to confuse your own team. So the prime targets are words that your opponent have a general idea of, but don't know exactly. Suppose you have the words SNAKE and ECONOMICS, and your opponents already know your other words of BODY and HAMMER completely. You've clued TRADE, SYSTEM, and STEAL for ECONOMICS. Giving a vague clue for SNAKE might be a bad idea, because even if your opponents don't know what word it is, they can easily shoehorn it in if none of the other connections make sense. A clue like GREEN would be great here to mislead the opponents into thinking your word is CURRENCY or MONEY. However, if you just picked randomly and didn't think about how precisely your opponents were thinking about the words, you may have missed this opportunity.

These are common clues that people clues that people make that are generally hurt your team more than help them. Here are some common pitfalls players fall into:

• Synonyms or obvious word associations: This pretty much directly feeds your opponent what your word is, and most of the time people can draw the association from all following clues. Examples would be cluing SLEEP for BED, or DIVING for SWIMMING.
• Obvious cultural references: If your word is WITCH, giving the clue SABRINA as a reference to Sabrina The Teenage Witch is really not hiding your word very well. Now, you can definitely do cultural references well, but if the clue can be summed up as "A character that is exactly that word" then it's probably not the greatest clue.
• Words that have extremely limited associations: Words that have no meaning outside of set phrases are easy for the opposing team to guess. An experienced opponent would easily know that the word POSIES is a clue for POCKET, as "Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies" is likely one of the few places they'd ever encounter that word.
• Words that are related to past clues of the same number, despite not being the same: This is a surprisingly common mistake. For example, the clues HAND and FOOT are fine clues for the word SOAP, but putting them back to back might not always be the greatest idea, unless you're bluffing against good players or confident that you will misdirect the opposing team with another word so you can trick them into thinking your word is something like BODY for later.

"Linked" words are also something to tread carefully with. While they are definitely more viable than the three kinds of clues mentioned above, they can often lead the enemy team to directly guessing your work. Examples of linked words would be:

• CELESTIAL for BODY (Celestial Body)
• STROKE for HEAT (Heat Stroke)
• PURPLE for RAIN (Purple Rain)

These clues aren't always bad, but they are Specific Clues. These are better saved for the midgame or for misdirection purposes than openers - using these often gives opponents a way of sniping the exact word.

Strong Early Game Clues

The strongest form of early game clues are ones that are vague, open up lots of associations for your team to later mess around with, and don't reveal too much about your other words either. (Some vague clues, like SMALL, might be problematic in the fact that they inform your opponents none of your other words are small, whereas something like LIGHT doesn't give much information about your other words.) Later game clues often need to dodge associations from previous words and/or attempt to misdirect, so those are where Specific/Linked words become stronger and giving clues becomes too situational to explain in a guide.

These are some examples of good clues that the writer of this guide has encountered, and an explanation as to why they're good. One thing to keep in mind is that none of these clues could easily get mixed up for other clues our team gave:

• RAIN for ISLAND - It's true that RAIN and ISLAND don't always go hand in hand, but this was something loosely associated enough to get easily guessed by the cluegiver's team. Not only did this give little information about their word being ISLAND, but they were able to mislead them later with words like SUNNY, which also applied to ISLAND as well.
• SOUND and WIND for THUNDERSTORM - An inexperienced player might be tempted to put something related to lightning, but these two clues were excellent and easily guessed by the cluegiver's team. Once again, it's something that's loosely associated and can be seen pretty clearly by our own team, but an opponent wouldn't be able to make such a connection easily.
• NOISY and MOVE for LOCOMOTIVE - Once again, these are words that were very flexible and applied to the word, but gave little information to the opponent. The team was later able to misdirect their opponents by using AUDIBLE for HORN, which was set up by an incredible hint that was just specific enough for the team, yet broad enough to where opponents could easily be misled.

These words may not be particularly flashy or cool, but they did what early game clues should do: enable lots of future misdirection and trickery by the sheer versatility of the words, while being good enough for the team to easily get them.

Interceptions

• Don't be defeatist. Always make an attempt at getting them, even if it's early in the game and the words seem random.

The odds of you intercepting correctly if acting completely randomly is 1/24. If you get even one association correct, even if you aren't sure on it, the odds of getting the right combination drop to 1/6. Always playing for the intercept, over the course of many games, will give you them in the long run - you just have to make an effort.

• Hunt Specific Clues.

Talk it out with your team. Think of every single word association you could make for clues that sound like linked clues or are suspiciously specific. While less experienced tables often have games decided by 2 Miscommunications, better players win more by Two Interceptions - or by Miscommunications caused by the pressure of avoiding interceptions - and being able to weed these out is a huge reason why.

• Metagame.

Take the skill level and any other factors visible on the opponents' profiles into account. In a table with intermediate players, it's probably true that HAND and FOOT would never fall under the same rule, but advanced players may be trying to bluff / set up a trick for later and beginner players might do it accidentally.

Guessing Your Team's Clues

• Think about what your teammates are thinking of. Sometimes, there might be a clue that fits for multiple words. But remember - your teammates were thinking about the words too - and "flipping a coin" is a way to easily get undeserved black tokens. A solid line of thought is this: Would my cluegiver actually pick that word if he saw the alternatives?

For example, if SPIDER and EYE are your clues and your cluegiver hints BLACK, it's very possible the cluegiver missed the phrase "Black Eye", but they would almost never try to give the clue BLACK for eye when spider is on the board. It's not a 50/50, and people have common sense. Take advantage of this when thinking about your cluegiver's choices.

• Also Metagame.

If you're in a pinch, you can think about the tendencies or regionalisms that your teammates may make.