Ruling — Codenames: Pictures

You asked

How do I play?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Codenames: Picturesbg-198773-en-1e

Setup

1. Organize players into 2 teams of roughly the same size, with at least two players on each team.[1]

2. Each team chooses 1 player to be their spymaster, while the rest are operatives.[1]

3. Mix up the picture cards, choose 20 at random, and lay them out in a 5×4 grid, ensuring all cards are oriented the same way.[1]

4. Spymasters choose a random key card and slide it into the stand between them, oriented the same as the 5×4 grid.[1]

5. Put 7 orange tiles in front of the orange spymaster and 7 purple tiles in front of the purple spymaster.[1]

6. Place the 4 bystanders and 1 assassin tiles in between.[1]

7. Give the double agent to the starting team (determined by the triangles on the top and bottom of the key card) and flip it to their color.[1]

A Turn

1. The spymaster provides a clue consisting of one word and one number.[2]

2. The clue must be about the pictures, not about patterns, letters, or shading.[3]

3. The spymaster may use "unlimited" instead of a number to allow as many guesses as the operatives want, provided they keep guessing correctly.[4]

4. Operatives discuss the clue and then one operative makes a guess by touching a card.[5]

5. If the guess is a picture in the team's own color, the operatives may guess again.[5]

6. As long as operatives keep guessing their own color, they are allowed to guess one more card than the number specified by the clue (the "plus one" rule).[6]

7. The spymaster covers the guessed picture with a tile matching the color shown on the key.[5]

8. A turn ends if: a wrong guess is made (an innocent bystander or the other team's picture), the players choose to end it voluntarily, or the "plus one" rule is used.[6]

9. When a turn ends, it is the other team's turn.[6]

Winning and Losing

1. A team wins if they have no pictures left to guess.[6]

2. A team can win by guessing their last picture, or if the other team guesses the team's last picture on their turn.[6]

3. A team also wins if the other team guesses the assassin.[6]

4. If a player guesses the assassin, they immediately lose the game.[6]

[1] RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook · p.2 · SPLIT INTO 2 TEAMS. · CHOOSE SPYMASTERS AND OPERATIVES. · LAY OUT 20 RANDOM PICTURES. · SPYMASTERS DRAW A RANDOM KEY CARD. · SPYMASTERS TAKE THE TILES. · GIVE THE DOUBLE AGENT TO THE STARTING TEAM.

[2] RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook · p.6 · KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE

[3] RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook · p.6 · VALID CLUES

[4] RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook · p.7 · UNLIMITED CLUE · Enhance your board game sessions! · CODENAMES PICTURES · A game by Vlaada Chvátil · ZERO CLUE

[5] RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook · p.4 · THE OPERATIVES MAY MAKE MULTIPLE GUESSES.

[6] RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook · p.5 · A WRONG GUESS ENDS YOUR TURN. · YOU CHOOSE TO END YOUR TURN. · YOU USE THE 'PLUS ONE' RULE. · WHEN YOUR TURN ENDS, IT IS THE OTHER TEAM'S TURN.

That's the page. Back to the table.

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live,vps
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 119 ms · ask 4148 ms · total 4271 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 4271 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 8, "score": 0.047163, "snippet": "Learn more at www.codenamesgame.com Spymasters must keep a straight face. When the operatives discuss your clue, do not react to their misguided ideas. Do not reach for any tile until they have touched one of the picture cards. If they guess right by accident, act like that was what you intended all", "headingPath": "REMINDERS AND TIPS · COMBINE WITH CODENAMES · CODENAMES APP · COMBINE WITH DUET", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "Your clue should be one word , no hyphens, no spaces. If you don't know whether your clue is one word, ask the opposing spymaster. If the opposing spymaster allows it, the clue is valid. In Codenames: Pictures, all word play is allowed. So you can use knight to lead your teammates to a picture with ", "headingPath": "VALID CLUES", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "The operatives should take a moment to discuss the clue. (Or, take a moment to think, if you are the only operative.) Then, one of the operatives must make a guess by touching one of the cards . The spymaster covers the picture with a tile matching the color shown on the key. If you guess a picture ", "headingPath": "THE OPERATIVES MAY MAKE MULTIPLE GUESSES.", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Three things can go wrong: If you guess an innocent bystander, your turn ends. If you guess the other team's picture, your turn ends, and you have helped the other team! If you guess the assassin, you immediately lose the game! If your turn does not end with a wrong guess, you can end it voluntarily", "headingPath": "A WRONG GUESS ENDS YOUR TURN. · YOU CHOOSE TO END YOUR TURN. · YOU USE THE 'PLUS ONE' RULE. · WHEN YOUR TURN ENDS, IT IS THE OTHER TEAM'S TURN.", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Organize players into 2 teams of roughly the same size, with at least two players on each team. Each team chooses 1 player to be their spymaster. The rest are operatives. The orange and purple spymasters sit on the same side of the table, opposite their own operatives. Mix up the picture cards, choo", "headingPath": "SPLIT INTO 2 TEAMS. · CHOOSE SPYMASTERS AND OPERATIVES. · LAY OUT 20 RANDOM PICTURES. · SPYMASTERS DRAW A RANDOM KEY CARD. · SPYMASTERS TAKE THE TILES. · GIVE THE DOUBLE AGENT TO THE STARTING TEAM.", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 1, "score": 0.030622, "snippet": "What are these weird symbols? They mark locations where operatives can meet with secret agents. Only the spymasters know who is hiding where. YOU CAN LEARN TO PLAY FROM THE VIDEO! www.cge.as/cnp-htp www.codenamesgame.com", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Spymasters are expected to give away no more information than one word and one number. Do not preface your clue with additional comments. 'I don't know if you will get this' is a fact that goes without saying. And 'I don't know if you will get this unless you've read The Hobbit ' reveals way too muc", "headingPath": "KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Instead of a number, you can say your clue is unlimited. For example, tiny: unlimited . This allows your operatives to make as many guesses as they want, as long as they keep guessing right. Operatives do not know how many pictures were intended by the unlimited clue, but sometimes they can figure i", "headingPath": "UNLIMITED CLUE · Enhance your board game sessions! · CODENAMES PICTURES · A game by Vlaada Chvátil · ZERO CLUE", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SPLIT INTO 2 TEAMS. · CHOOSE SPYMASTERS AND OPERATIVES. · LAY OUT 20 RANDOM PICTURES. · SPYMASTERS DRAW A RANDOM KEY CARD. · SPYMASTERS TAKE THE TILES. · GIVE THE DOUBLE AGENT TO THE STARTING TEAM.", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "VALID CLUES", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "UNLIMITED CLUE · Enhance your board game sessions! · CODENAMES PICTURES · A game by Vlaada Chvátil · ZERO CLUE", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 4, "quote": null, "headingPath": "THE OPERATIVES MAY MAKE MULTIPLE GUESSES.", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "A WRONG GUESS ENDS YOUR TURN. · YOU CHOOSE TO END YOUR TURN. · YOU USE THE 'PLUS ONE' RULE. · WHEN YOUR TURN ENDS, IT IS THE OTHER TEAM'S TURN.", "sharpsignalDocId": 119}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 119 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 119 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
answer fence: passed — letter density 0.89424 of 1702 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
debug row recorded: Aug 21, 2026 16:38 UTC

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	REMINDERS AND TIPS · COMBINE WITH CODENAMES · CODENAMES APP · COMBINE WITH DUET	p.8	0.047163 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	VALID CLUES	p.6	0.047123 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	THE OPERATIVES MAY MAKE MULTIPLE GUESSES.	p.4	0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	A WRONG GUESS ENDS YOUR TURN. · YOU CHOOSE TO END YOUR TURN. · YOU USE THE 'PLUS ONE' RULE. · WHEN YOUR TURN ENDS, IT IS THE OTHER TEAM'S TURN.	p.5	0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	SPLIT INTO 2 TEAMS. · CHOOSE SPYMASTERS AND OPERATIVES. · LAY OUT 20 RANDOM PICTURES. · SPYMASTERS DRAW A RANDOM KEY CARD. · SPYMASTERS TAKE THE TILES. · GIVE THE DOUBLE AGENT TO THE STARTING TEAM.	p.2	0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)		p.1	0.030622 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	220
#7	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE	p.6	0.030303 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	UNLIMITED CLUE · Enhance your board game sessions! · CODENAMES PICTURES · A game by Vlaada Chvátil · ZERO CLUE	p.7	0.029851 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

candidate pool: the answering read scored 9 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.

floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — not armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.

arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.

read at	document	heading	page	fused rank	fused RRF score	carried by	how it got its slot
#1	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	VALID CLUES	p.6	#2	0.047123 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#2	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	A WRONG GUESS ENDS YOUR TURN. · YOU CHOOSE TO END YOUR TURN. · YOU USE THE 'PLUS ONE' RULE. · WHEN YOUR TURN ENDS, IT IS THE OTHER TEAM'S TURN.	p.5	#4	0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#3	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	UNLIMITED CLUE · Enhance your board game sessions! · CODENAMES PICTURES · A game by Vlaada Chvátil · ZERO CLUE	p.7	#8	0.029851 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#4	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	THE OPERATIVES MAY MAKE MULTIPLE GUESSES.	p.4	#3	0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#5	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)		p.1	#6	0.030622 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text	the re-ranker chose it
#6	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE	p.6	#7	0.030303 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#7	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	REMINDERS AND TIPS · COMBINE WITH CODENAMES · CODENAMES APP · COMBINE WITH DUET	p.8	#1	0.047163 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it
#8	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	SPLIT INTO 2 TEAMS. · CHOOSE SPYMASTERS AND OPERATIVES. · LAY OUT 20 RANDOM PICTURES. · SPYMASTERS DRAW A RANDOM KEY CARD. · SPYMASTERS TAKE THE TILES. · GIVE THE DOUBLE AGENT TO THE STARTING TEAM.	p.2	#5	0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	vector + the doc-priority boost arm	the re-ranker chose it

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	SPLIT INTO 2 TEAMS. · CHOOSE SPYMASTERS AND OPERATIVES. · LAY OUT 20 RANDOM PICTURES. · SPYMASTERS DRAW A RANDOM KEY CARD. · SPYMASTERS TAKE THE TILES. · GIVE THE DOUBLE AGENT TO THE STARTING TEAM.	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE	p.6	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	VALID CLUES	p.6	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	UNLIMITED CLUE · Enhance your board game sessions! · CODENAMES PICTURES · A game by Vlaada Chvátil · ZERO CLUE	p.7	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	THE OPERATIVES MAY MAKE MULTIPLE GUESSES.	p.4	no quote on the wire
[6]	RULEBOOK Codenames: Pictures — Rulebook (corpus doc 119)	A WRONG GUESS ENDS YOUR TURN. · YOU CHOOSE TO END YOUR TURN. · YOU USE THE 'PLUS ONE' RULE. · WHEN YOUR TURN ENDS, IT IS THE OTHER TEAM'S TURN.	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 119 ms · first delta 1497 ms · total 4271 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 119 ms · ask 4148 ms · gateway work 4271 ms · total 4271 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3158
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 557
tok/sec: 204.5 tok/sec — 557 output tokens in 2.724 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 45s ago)
answerer host (measured by rulesage): reachable (for 23h, checked 6s ago)
answerer node (the seat proxy's own header — this probe, not this ask): node1
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 41), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.