Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
In Codename: Oracle, you are an American CIA Psychic Operative or a Soviet KGB Mentalist in a struggle of wills with the fate of the world at stake. Can you pry the launch codes out of your target's mind before a nuclear showdown?
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
In Codename: Oracle, you are an American CIA Psychic Operative or a Soviet KGB Mentalist in a struggle of wills with the fate of the world at stake. Can you pry the launch codes out of your target's mind before a nuclear showdown? Each player has a "Mind-field" made up of a 4x5 grid of Zener cards. (Zener cards were designed by perceptual psychologist Karl Zener in the early 1930s and used to conduct experiments for extra-sensory perception, most often clairvoyance.) The players also have a "Code Row" of five cards which represents their launch code. Players must position and remember where cards are in their mind-field in order to group them and perform a "strike", "shield", or "focus". Each of these has a different effect depending on the matching Zener cards turned over and used. To win the game, a player must either correctly guess each Zener card in the opponent's Code Row, or deal enough psychic damage to the opponent to move that player's life counter to zero.