Codenames pictures Board game Review

In Codenames pictures you all are secret super spies who probably have twenty-seven cool looking guns back at home and have almost certainly terminated at least seven heads of state. Now out on a field mission, you must locate your other sneaky companions with the help of a Spymaster before your rival organisation locates theirs.

Codenames pictures is a game where you play in two teams of two or more people: one person in each team is the Spymaster and the rest normal field operatives. In the middle of the table you place a 4 by 5 grid of surreal pictures (like a dinosaur riding a penny farthing) which each represent the location of different coloured spies (red for one team blue for the other) or regular citizens - only the Spymasters know which ones are which. Each turn the Spymaster must give a one-word clue to guide their field operative teammates to the pictures representing the location of the spy. They also give a number to indicate how many spy locations this clue will reveal. The Spymaster’s teammates then guess which picture represents the location of a spy from their team. If they guess correctly, they place down one of their spy tokens on that picture and can have another guess, but if they guess wrong, they have to stop and their turn is over. Whichever team can find the location of all their spies first wins.

Codenames pictures isn’t actually the first ‘Codenames’ game, with the original title in the series having just words on the cards instead of pictures. I, for one, much prefer the pictures version as instead of 4 by 5 grid of cards just having words on them and looking like you’ve wandered into a seriously geeky literature festival, you get to enjoy the black and white surreal art that makes you wonder if someone has slipped something in your drink. The addition of pictures both makes everything look much cooler and is more open to interpretation than the words, making it a great improvement on the base game.

However, having a major improvement still doesn’t mean this game is going to be amazing. This game often suffers from massive pauses where the Spymasters legitimately struggle to think of a clue that could even point to one or two of the spies hiding places. Even I would prefer the mind-numbing boringness of German lessons (let me tell you they were painful) to the extensive silent periods in this game as you wait for a Spymaster to think of a clue.

But even with these big pauses the rest of my family still enjoy the problem-solving element of the game and have fun trying to puzzle out what clues to give or what picture cards could relate to the word ‘circus’. Personally though, I find these interesting decisions too spread out for my own liking.

Finally, this game makes pulling back from a loss very tricky (even more tricky than understanding German grammar, which is why to a native speaker of German I probably sound like Yoda). If your team isn’t doing well at the start of the game, probably due to having cards that have no natural link between them, this isn’t going to change meaning your team will stay behind.

Overall, if you liked the first game (Codenames) then you probably like this game but it is practically the same and therefore probably not worth picking up.  However, if you are a newcomer to the series, I would probably give this a pass. This game ends up leaving you not feeling less like the swish and cool James Bond and more like Dave who works alone in a darkened room as a part time secretary for a small branch of the MI5.