Decrypto

Decrypto is a game that consists of communicating safely to your teammates... and I feel it takes the best parts of games like Charades, Pictionary, Codenames and furthers it's evolution.

It is a very difficult game to describe... best summed up by Detective James Carter.

In Decrypto, two opposing teams are assigned 4 codewords, each slotted into a team board with numbers 1-4.

Players then take turns becoming their teams Encryptor.  They draw from a deck of cards and are given a 3 number code.  eg. 3.1.2

Then the Encryptor must give clues that allude to the matching codeword for that slot number so that the rest of the team can decipher the code and come up with 3.1.2.  The encryptor is not allowed to participate in the teams discussion.

However, here's the catch.  The opposing team is listening to your communications as well so the clues that you give can't be too obvious as starting in the second round each team gets to attempt intercepting the other teams code.  In later rounds if you have been giving too obvious clues you will enable the other team to win easily.

The game ends when the first team to gain two intercepts or if teams fail to communicate their code twice.

In my first year of college in my Internetworking course we learned about ALOHAnet.  In the 1970's the University of Hawaii had been trying to devise a way to communicate with all the other islands in the chain back to their main computing system on the island of Oahu campus.

Traditional networks of the day usually used a way to signify a user/host had the ability to speak so there wasn't any collisions. eg. Token Ring.  If you don't have the Token you cannae speak!

They set up a bunch of 9600 baud modems attached to radio broadcast towers and devised a method of transmitting at the same time and if there was a collision to resend the information later.  And thus the base concepts of Wireless LAN and Ethernet were born.

I would not be here talking to you on this blog today without these pioneers!  What does this have to do with Decrypto?  Well back to my internetworking course.  We had a short lab exercise where we had to devise a method to communicate to our lab partner via code and figure out an error correction method without talking.   This game reminds me a lot of that exercise, but a lot more fun as you can use words, sentences, mime, hum, sing etc.

Game Components

Decrypto is a game that is well made with crisp clean graphics with funky oscilliscopes and old CRT screens giving it a bit of a pop Cold War feel.  Even the mascot looks like mashup of the 7up Spot/Newton computer.

The Team Codeword board has these cool red cellophane windows that decode the red masking on the card.  Excuse me while I show my age, but in the olden days of x86 computing there was a game developer/publisher called Sierra Entertainment.  Games like King's Quest, Quest for Glory, Police Quest, Space Quest we're a big part of my youth.  From my first 486 computer to my first Pentium.  I played these games many times over.  Can you imagine installing a game from 20 floppies?  Those were the good old days.

Anyways I digressed from my original digression.  What does that red cellophane have to do with Sierra Entertainment.  Well back before the internet if you were stuck in a game you couldn't very well Google it.  So there were official hint books that were published and they were encoded in the same way that the cards in Decrypto are.  Blue text covered in random red patterns.

Place your decoder card with the red cellophane over the page and you knew what to do!  Yes Larry, don't eat the spinach dip on the dingy...it'll kill ya!


Play by Forum

There is a wonderful boardgame site that I follow called Shut Up and Sit Down.  They make awesome videos reviewing games as well as a great monthly podcast.

Anyhow, a few podcasts ago they challenged the forum to try Decrypto in a Play by Forum format.  Verdict:  It works really well and we are about to start our 3rd game. 

Unsurprisingly a 30 min game in person lasts about 20-25 days on the forum.  Considering that players are literally all around the world it runs pretty smooth. We give the encryptor 24 hours to post their clues and then teams 48 hours to come up with the decipher and intercept attempts.  It is awesome to watch the creativity of the players coming up with clues without the use of body language and eye contact.  Add in cultural differences/pop references/lingo/slang and it makes for a good game!

Because I am running the game in the PbF, I get to watch both sides playing and the best part of the game is in the later rounds when everything is on the line.  You get the nervousness of the team nominating someone to post their response.  Anticipation of the Encryptor posting their fate.  uh oh here comes the 2nd  Miscommunication!

If you ever want to give it a shot and we are still running, pop over to the SUSD Forums and join us.

Decrypto - 30 mins - 12+ - 3-8 Players