Saying nothing is free

The world of board game promotion is an interesting place, like a zoo for advertising professionals. Its largest marketing tools are Meta, a surreal landscape of disinfo bots and your Boomer relatives, and BoardGameGeek, a long-running forum with a Rotten Tomatoes-esque rating feature and previews stapled on. My brief peeks inside the exhibits these days are often baffling and illustrative, as was the case with Czech Games Edition’s unfortunate weekend. 

The veteran publisher received criticism on social media when it revealed a new Harry Potter-themed edition of Codenames. People were not happy to find that CGE and the massively popular cooperative guessing game would play party to maligned author and professional bigot JK Rowling’s concerted relaunch of her multibillion-dollar brand empire. Comments beneath the public announcement expressed both criticism and disappointment, up until they started disappearing. The company deactivated comments on several Bluesky posts, and, over the course of the next three days, seemingly blocked more than 200 personal accounts, according to the ClearSky tool.

On June 25, the publisher released a statement titled “Why we created the new licensed version of Codenames,” which attempts an anemic defense of their decision to accept Harry Potter money but not the inevitable public backlash from accepting aforementioned Harry Potter money — it can't even muster an explicit mention of the boy wizard, instead referring to it as a "vast world of magic."