Targeted Clues: Make One Clue Speak Differently to Different People
Technical terms: Targeted clue
A targeted clue is meant to guide particular people while remaining ambiguous, unhelpful, or misleading to others. The clue-giver must estimate shared associations and reveal enough for the intended audience without giving the same information to everyone.
This is not merely describing an answer. It is designing language for several minds at once.
See it in Codenames
A spymaster gives one word and a number to connect several friendly target words while avoiding opposing words and the assassin. Both teams learn from the clue and the guesses it causes.
What you can do with it
Decide whose knowledge the clue assumes. Formal restrictions can protect the puzzle, but cultural references and private history may unintentionally exclude people who were supposed to participate.
Ask a player
What shared knowledge did the clue expect, and did that expectation make you feel included?
Nearby ideas
- Cluing — construct language that leads another person toward an answer.
- Communication limits — constrain what a clue-giver may reveal.
- Theory of mind — model what another person knows and will infer.
- Authorial inference — reason backward from authored language to intention.
Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev, Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design (2020), RES-17, p. 150. ---