Reveal gives you one real decision, and it is a good one: stop now and gamble, or keep looking and lose ground?
There is no correct answer. But there are better and worse ways to think about it.
The trade you are making
Every second of holding does two things at once: it makes you more likely to be right, and it makes your rank worse if you are.
And being wrong is not a smaller prize. It is no prize — wrong answers do not rank at all. So the question is never "how confident am I?" on its own. It is "am I confident enough that gambling beats waiting?"
The reference points
- 10% — the earliest you can answer. Almost always a coin flip unless you recognised it instantly.
- 20-30% — where a confident guess usually lives. Enough for a room, a horizon, a familiar object.
- 50%+ — you are now behind anyone who recognised it. Fine if you would otherwise be wrong.
- Nearly clear — you will be last among the correct answers. Still better than being wrong.
When to commit early
Commit the moment you actually recognise something. Not when you have confirmed it — when you recognise it.
If a corner of the photo is unmistakably your friend's kitchen, more of the photo will not make it more their kitchen. You already have the answer. Holding longer just costs you rank.
The most common mistake in Reveal is uncovering the whole photo to confirm something you knew at 15%.
When to keep holding
- Nothing has clicked yet. No amount of gambling helps if you have no candidate.
- Two options both fit. Uncover until something separates them. Being second is far better than being unranked.
- The photo is genuinely ambiguous. Some are. Take the rank hit.
Read the answers early
The six options are information too. Often one of them will make sense of a detail you have already uncovered — a colour, a shape, a texture you had not interpreted yet.
Hold in short bursts and check the list between them. Since the total held time is what counts, pausing to think costs you nothing.
Playing the group
You can see who has already answered while the round runs — but never how they did. So you cannot read anyone's answer off the board, and there is no advantage in waiting to see what others do.
What the list does tell you is how many people are still deciding. If most of your friends have already gone, the podium may already be spoken for. That is a reason to commit rather than a reason to be careful.
Being wrong is fine
You still earn 3 Aura for guessing, right or wrong, and it still counts towards your Detective ladder. The game is explicit about this: being wrong in front of your friends is still playing with them.
The players who never place are the ones who never open the Reveal, not the ones who guess and miss.