To me, Haiclue feels like the missing link between something like Codenames and ‘serious’ boardgaming (non-party games). The emergent poetry is sometimes quite striking, but it’s still accessible enough that I’ve been able to introduce it to friends who don’t play anything heavy.
It’s also free to play on BoardGameArena, and I can’t recommend it enough.
Do you know the game Concept? It’s similar to that (at least with our house rules, I don’t remember if the official ones were different)
Oh yes, I quite enjoy Concept. To me, Codenames, Concept and Haiclue all have that fundamental ‘make a clue with extremely limited options and get people to guess them’ framework, they just differ in how they implement those limitations (one word for Codenames, limited word pool for Haiclue, and conceptually building the clue for Concept)