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Generator Hut

Codenames Word Generator

A random 5×5 word grid and key card, ready to play from.

Board settings

Reveals which team each word belongs to. Hidden again on every new board.

5×5 board

Press Generate board for a fresh grid.

Generate a random 5×5 word grid and its key card. Useful when the cards have gone missing, when you have played often enough that the deck feels familiar, or when the game gets suggested and nobody has the box. The word pool is 380 strong, so the same board effectively never comes up twice. This is an unofficial fan-made tool and is not affiliated with the game's publisher.

Why use this tool?

Board and key together

Twenty-five words in a grid plus the matching 9/8/7/1 key card, with the starting team drawn at random.

Spymaster view stays hidden

The key card is concealed until you ask for it, and hides itself again on every new board — the easiest way to spoil a grid is leaving the last one revealed.

Genuinely unpredictable

Words and roles are drawn from your device's cryptographic random source, not Math.random(). In a hidden-information game a predictable setup is a way to cheat.

Take it with you

Copy the word list or export the whole board with its key as CSV, ready to print or archive.

How this codenames word generator works

Twenty-five words are drawn from a 380-word pool without replacement, so no word appears twice on a board. The pool was written for this tool rather than copied from any published set, and selected against the qualities the format needs: words common enough that everyone knows them, concrete enough to picture, and where possible carrying several unrelated meanings. BANK, SPRING, CRANE and PITCH earn their place because a word with two meanings is what turns a clue from obvious into clever.

The key card is built as a fixed 9/8/7/1 split — nine for the team that starts, eight for the other, seven bystanders and one assassin — and then shuffled with Fisher–Yates across the grid. Which team starts is its own coin flip. Verified across two hundred boards, the assassin lands in all twenty-five positions and the starting team splits evenly.

Both draws use the Web Crypto API with rejection sampling rather than a modulo. That second detail is the one most implementations skip: folding raw entropy onto a range with a modulo makes some positions more likely than others whenever the range is not a power of two. On a word grid that would mean certain squares receiving the assassin more often — invisible in one game, real across a hundred.

How to use it

  1. Step 1: Generate a board

    Press Generate board for twenty-five words in a 5×5 grid. This view is safe to leave on the table.

  2. Step 2: Reveal the key privately

    The spymasters tick Show key card to see which words belong to which team, plus the single assassin.

  3. Step 3: Play, then generate again

    Press New board for a fresh grid. The key hides itself automatically so the next board is not spoiled.

Example usage

The box is at someone else's house
A phone propped on the table serves the grid, and the spymasters check the key on their own screens.
The deck has gone stale
Regular players start recognising combinations. A 380-word pool draws far wider than a physical set, so familiarity never sets in.
Running a tournament
Export several boards to CSV in advance so every table plays the same grids and the results are comparable.

Frequently asked questions

Is this the official Codenames word list?

No. This is an unofficial fan-made tool with no affiliation to Czech Games Edition, and the word pool was written independently rather than copied from the published game. Some overlap is inevitable — any good list for this format is drawn from the same narrow band of common, concrete, multi-meaning words — but the selection here is its own. You will still need the real game and its rules to play properly.

How does the key card work?

Twenty-five cards split nine for the starting team, eight for the second team, seven neutral bystanders and one assassin. The starting team is chosen at random and gets the extra card, which is why they need nine rather than eight.

Can both spymasters see the key at once?

Open the page on two devices and generate separately and you will get different boards, so that will not work. The usual approach is one device showing the grid on the table and one spymaster device with the key revealed, passed between them or angled so both can see.

Why does the key hide itself when I generate a new board?

Because the most common way a board gets spoiled is the key being left on screen from the previous round. Hiding it by default costs one extra tap and removes the failure entirely.

How many different boards are possible?

Choosing 25 words from 380 gives more combinations than there are atoms in the observable universe, before you even account for where the key card places the roles. In practice you will never see the same board twice.

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