Codenames Pictures is a game played by two teams, each of which has a spymaster who provides one-word clues in an attempt to guide their team members to select as many cards as possible in the set they are tasked with finding. The cards represent locations of secret agents, and the team members are field operatives seeking to find these agents. It's quite challenging and demands a lot of creativity to come up with one word connecting as many of the correct cards as possible while at the same time not leading team members to select incorrect cards. More on all this in a moment.
First a story about how we came to play this game last night. I visited a dear friend yesterday afternoon (with proper social-distancing, of course), and while talking she used the word "dauphin" completely naturally in the midst of conversation. That made me ridiculously happy! "Dauphin" is one of the words I've used as a clue in this game in the past, only to find that my teammates had no idea what that word meant. That blew me away because I live in a household of serious word nerds, but somehow that word had never made it into their vocabulary. How was I to know?! I've been razzed about it a few times since and have been told, when we play word games, to "use words that people know." So to have had my friend use this word naturally in conversation was both affirming and, actually, kind of thrilling! When I got home I wanted to look up my post on this game, and I was surprised to find I hadn't posted about it yet, as it's one we all enjoy very much. So my family graciously agreed to play it last night so we could add this to our official game count.
The photo above is just a sampling of some of the cards. There are many more picture cards than this, and each card has a different image on the back, so there is a great deal of variety. This allows for the game to be played over and over without the same combinations of cards coming up and keeps the game fresh and challenging. At first glance many of the pictures look like normal objects, but a closer look shows them to have unusual features. I find this version of the game to be quite whimsical (as opposed to the original
Codenames, which I also like, but for which the cards each contain a single word). I enjoy the whimsy for its own sake, but the unusual extra elements in the pictures also allow for more flexibility and creativity in trying to make connections through giving single-word clues.
Above is the beginning set-up. Each round involves a randomly-selected 4x5 grid of cards. Each card represents the location of a "field operative." A team wins by being the first to find all of its field operatives and without selecting the card associated with the assassin (which results in immediate loss of the game).
Correctly-guessed cards are covered with pictures of agents, red for one team and blue for the other. White cover-cards represent innocent bystanders, and the black cover-card represents the assassin.
The color-coded grid in the stand above shows the location of the red agents, the blue agents, the bystanders and the assassin. This is what the spymasters use to know what cards to try to lead their team members to select.
Above is a closer view of cards from our third round. With only four of us playing we re-did the pairings for each round so that each of us ended up on a team with each other person one time. This also makes for a good party game. There's really no limit on the number of players on a team, except for the fact that everyone should be able to see the cards well.
I'll finish out this post with some closer views of some of the game elements. The first picture below is of a few of the many grid-configurations. The red or blue bars on the sides of these cards indicate which team is going first that round. You'll notice that the team going first has one more card to find than the team going second.
Here's a grid card in the stand. The back of the card is blank. This card could have been rotated 180 degrees, so each of these cards has two possibilities, which, again, means there is a lot of variety for game play, and you won't run into a problem with the same patterns coming up and being recognizable no matter how often you play.
Here are some of what I'm calling "cover-cards." I've already mentioned what red, blue, black and white stand for, but there's also that card in the lower right that is blue but has red on it as well. Since the team that goes first has one additional agent to find, this card goes to the first team and can serve as red or blue, whatever that team's color is.
I do have a very short post of the original game, the words-only version, at
this link, which you can view if you'd like to compare the the two.
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