Two rival spymasters know the secret identities of their agents in the field. Their teammates know the agents only by their CODENAMES.

In Codenames: Pictures, two teams compete to see who can make contact with all of their agents first. Spymasters give one-word clues that ideally relate to several agents on the board. Their teammates try to guess agents of the right color while avoiding those that belong to the opposing team — and everyone wants to avoid the assassin.

Codenames: Pictures differs from the original Codenames in that the agents are no longer represented by a single word, but by an image that contains multiple elements.