Wouter & Ymke 
Codenames is one of those games that just keeps showing up at tables. I mean, even people who don’t really follow board games know it. Someone always brings it out when the group gets big enough. It’s easy to start, it creates instant tension between teammates, and it has a special talent for making you question your friends’ thought processes.
Back to Hogwarts takes that familiar system and puts it inside the Harry Potter world, but it also adds house abilities on top. So it’s not only a theme swap. It’s more like the game got extra rules layered over the original skeleton. For us, that means it still feels like Codenames at heart, but it asks a bit more attention from everyone at the table.
Instead of spies, you’re prefects guiding new students through Hogwarts. You’re trying to point them to the right places without accidentally sending them into locked doors or straight into Argus Filch. Which, honestly, fits the mood of our guesses perfectly. Half the time we look confident. The other half we look like we’ve accepted detention.
👥 4-8 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designer: Vlaada Chvátil
🎨 Artwork: Štěpán Drašťák & Ondřej Hrdina
🏢 Publisher: Czech Games Edition (review copy provided)
Gameplay overview
The structure is still the classic format. Two teams, one prefect each. The prefects share a hidden map that shows which cards belong to which side. Everyone else is interpreting clues and trying not to sabotage their own team.
You build a 5 by 5 grid with 24 cards, leaving the middle space empty. The team that goes second starts with a tile already placed in that centre spot so the order feels fair. Each card shows either a word or a picture from the Wizarding World, depending on which side you choose to play.
On your turn, the prefect gives one word and a number. The word is meant to connect several cards your team should guess. The number tells them how many. Then the table discussion starts. And when I say discussion, I mean people confidently explaining nonsense while everyone else nods like it makes sense.
After each guess, the prefect reveals the card. Correct guess, keep going. Locked door, turn ends. Opponent’s card, you just helped them. Argus Filch, game over. No heroic recovery, just immediate defeat. It’s brutal in a way that feels right for the theme.
Teams can guess one extra card beyond the number given, so you can try to recover old clues if you feel bold. A team can even win during the other team’s turn if their last card gets revealed by accident. We’ve done that. It’s hilarious for five seconds and then someone demands a rematch.
When you add house abilities, the symmetry disappears. Each house changes how the game behaves. Gryffindor interacts with locked doors, Slytherin can mark cards without guessing them, Ravenclaw gets extra information about how their cards connect, and Hufflepuff adds herbology cards tied to specific map spaces. On top of that, the house cup hourglasses let your wins carry over between sessions, so your matches start to feel linked instead of isolated.
You can play without any of this and keep it simple. Or you can go all in and let the houses complicate things.
Artwork, components, and visual design
The production leans heavily into the Hogwarts theme, but in a practical way. The cards look like wizard trading cards, with portraits and locations inside those cream-coloured frames that feel like they came straight out of a Hogwarts archive drawer.
The double-sided cards are one of the best decisions in the box. Words on one side, pictures on the other. With words, you’re rewarding Harry Potter knowledge. With pictures, you’re letting people rely on visual connections instead. In mixed groups, pictures kept the game inclusive. Otherwise it risks turning into a fan quiz.
The house tiles are thick and colourful, easy to see and handle. The hourglass stand looks like a tiny Hogwarts scoreboard and becomes the visual centre of the table. It’s the piece new players immediately ask about.
Once abilities are in play, the number of tokens increases noticeably. It’s not overwhelming, but it does move the game away from the minimalist feel of classic Codenames.
Our experience
We followed the rulebook advice and started without house abilities. In that mode, it slips right into place. Fast turns, clear rules, no friction. When we added the houses, the game gained flavour but also gained weight. Suddenly every match felt shaped by faction powers instead of pure word association.
People leaned into their houses more than we expected. It sounds silly on paper, but it changed how people talked. “That’s such a Slytherin move” became a running joke. The house cup scoreboard made our games feel connected from one session to the next. Wins carried over, rivalries stuck around. For us, that meant we cared more about rematches than we normally would in a party game.
The word versus picture choice ended up being important. Word mode quietly pushed non-fans to the background. Picture mode kept everyone participating. That alone made the picture side our default.
House abilities are the dividing line. Slytherin introduces direct interaction during the opponent’s turn, which some players love and others find stressful. Ravenclaw adds a logic layer that appeals to puzzle-minded players but can make the board feel more solvable and less chaotic. Hufflepuff’s herbology cards create swings that can rescue a bad situation, but sometimes victories feel slightly handed to you. None of this is wrong. It just changes the emotional texture of mistakes.
The result is a version of Codenames that rewards repeat groups who enjoy learning systems. If your table prefers instant accessibility with no overhead, the original might still be the better fit.
Our thoughts
For us, Back to Hogwarts doesn’t replace the original. It sits beside it. Classic Codenames is tight and even. This version is more uneven, more expressive, and more shaped by faction identity. Some players at our table still prefer the base game because every loss feels clean. Here, abilities sometimes cushion mistakes or open alternate paths to victory.
The game clearly assumes you already like Codenames and want something deeper. The entry cost is higher. There are more reminders, more tokens, more edge cases. We didn’t mind learning it, but I wouldn’t introduce this version to a brand-new group first.
Replayability comes less from the card pool and more from rotating houses and tracking the house cup score. Over time, teams build identity. That’s unusual for a party game, and honestly it’s the part we ended up caring about most.
At its core, this is still Codenames. It’s about communication, risk, and watching your friends convince themselves that your clue obviously meant the wrong thing. The house system adds flavour. Not everyone will want that flavour. For us, once we started using the abilities, we didn’t really want to go back. I guess we’ve accepted our house fate at this point.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Czech Games Edition.
Note: Some players choose to avoid Wizarding World products because of the public controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling, while others separate the work from the creator. Czech Games Edition stated they would donate profits from this game to trans-supportive charities. Readers who consider this important may want to look into it before deciding.
