Board Game Arena

Is googling in the game allowed?

It's not 100% clear, as the rules do not explicitly permit or prohibit it.

To me it feels very contrary to the spirit of the game -- why try to solve the puzzle myself if I can just type all the words together into Google and see what the algorithm thinks the common thread is?

The language in the rules is "The Clues must be based on information that is publicly available. You can certainly refer to obscure Croatian poets of the 17th Century—it’s risky, but allowed!" This seems to strongly imply that Googling is not allowed. Otherwise, such an obscure reference wouldn't be "risky" at all, as your teammates could just Google it. The risk comes entirely from the fact that not everyone will know the word.

Some people obviously google in this game which makes it extremely long when playing real-time. I understand the timer is sometimes really short but honestly having an hour-long real time game is not enjoyable. The game IRL uses a timer for a reason.

IMHO no. I'd never allow it when playing IRL. Well, I don't even have to enforce it because people I play with have self-esteem and because of a social stigma. I understand that when playing online you might not have no idea about strengths / weaknesses of players you're teamed with but .. then you just have to either risk or give very general clues. IRL I know what clues I can (not) give to players, online it is much harder. Especially so as I lately have only have been playing turn-based games and I know decrypto isn't ideal for it .. especially since you can spend as a teammate or as an opponent to search everything related to clues. I might be naive but I still believe most people here are honest.

I only play Decrypto in real time, but it has become so common that players openly chat about it amongst their team. I've had teammates copy and paste directly from a dictionary into the team chat, or write "Google says ..."

I agree - a player would never do that when playing on a tabletop.

If you don't understand what a clue means, I think it'd be fair google it in isolation. If your clue is x though, I think it'd be outright cheating to Google word1 x, word2 x, etc. You're just asking AI to make connections for you.

I have seen it backfire. I gave the clue "nine" once and a teammate googled "nine tie," saw "Verse 9" was some obscure brand of neck ties, and went with it. Would have gotten a lot more hits if he googled "nine joy." I was proud of that clue too