Fun quirk about this game: If there aren't too many cards left and your teammate knows their powers of two, you have a winning strategy.
You simply lay a mental bitmap over all remaining cards, setting 1 for cards that belong to your team and 0 for all others.
You can then just say the number that is represented by this bitmap, e.g. "five" for 0101, and your teammate can decode it in their head. All numbers are, after all, single words.
This means, if you are very good at mental maths or you allow for a calculator, you could also win every game in the first round.
For me personally however, it only becomes feasible with around 10 cards remaining.
It is explicitly against the rules (https://czechgames.com/files/rules/codenames-rules-en.pdf), so they were correct. "Your clue must be about the meaning of the words. You can't use your clue to talk about the letters in a word or its position on the table."
