How to Make a Picture Reveal Game in PowerPoint Using AI

Creating an interactive picture reveal game in PowerPoint is a fantastic way to boost engagement in classrooms, meetings, and training sessions. This guide will show you how to build one from scratch, leveraging the power of AI to generate your images and questions, making the process faster and more creative than ever before.

What is a Picture Reveal Game and Why Bother?

A picture reveal game is simple but effective: an image is hidden behind a grid of numbered shapes. Participants guess what the hidden image is as squares are removed one by one. It’s a versatile format that can be adapted for any topic.

Why use this in a professional or educational setting? Because it transforms passive learning into an active experience. Instead of just presenting information, you’re creating anticipation and a fun challenge. This technique is brilliant for:

• Training & Onboarding: To introduce new products, logos, or team members.
• Classroom learning: For vocabulary words, historical figures, scientific concepts, or works of art.
• Corporate Meetings: As a lively icebreaker or to reveal team goals and project milestones.
• Marketing Presentations: To tease a new campaign or product feature reveal in a memorable way.

Using PowerPoint for this is ideal because it's a tool most people already have and understand. You don't need fancy software, all the power you need is already built-in, specifically with its advanced animation features.

Supercharge Your Game with AI Tools

Before jumping into PowerPoint, let's explore how AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Manually searching for the perfect public domain image or brainstorming clever trivia questions can be time-consuming. AI accelerates this preparation dramatically.

Generating Unique Images with AI

Instead of scouring stock photo sites, you can create the exact image you need with an AI image generator. This ensures your image is unique, perfectly suited to your topic, and free from copyright concerns.

Popular AI image generators include Midjourney, DALL-E 3 (available via ChatGPT Plus or Microsoft Designer), and Adobe Firefly. The key is to write a good "prompt" - a text description of the image you want.

Tips for writing effective image prompts:

• Be specific: Instead of "a dog," try "a photorealistic golden retriever puppy catching a red ball in a sunny park."
• Define the style: Use stylistic keywords like "watercolor painting," "vector art," "black and white photograph," or "pixel art."
• Add context: Phrases like "close-up shot," "cinematic lighting," or "minimalist design" help guide the AI.

Example Prompts for Different Scenarios:

• History Class: "Realistic oil painting of Leonardo da Vinci working attentively on the Mona Lisa in his studio, with a soft, warm light coming from a window."
• Product Reveal: "Sleek and professional product shot of a futuristic-looking wireless earbud on a clean white background, minimalist style."
• Company Training: "Simple vector illustration of a diverse group of four office workers collaborating around a table, bright and friendly color palette."

Once you have your generated image, simply save it to your computer, ready to be used in PowerPoint.

Crafting Trivia Questions with AI

You can also use AI language models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to create questions and answers for your game. If you want players to answer a question to earn the right to reveal a square, AI can be your instant question writer.

Example prompt for ChatGPT: "I'm creating a picture reveal game for a 6th-grade science class. The hidden picture is of planet Saturn. Please give me 10 multiple-choice trivia questions about the solar system that are appropriate for a 12-year-old. Make the first few questions easier and the last few harder. Provide the correct answer for each."

In less than a minute, you'll have a ready-made Q&A list you can use to add another layer of interaction to your game.

Building Your Picture Reveal Game: A Step-by-Step Guide

Now that you have your AI-generated materials, it’s time to build the game inside PowerPoint. The key to making this work is an animation feature called "Triggers," which allows you to start an animation by clicking on a specific object instead of just advancing the slide.

Step 1: Set Up Your Slide and Image

1. Open a new PowerPoint presentation and create a blank slide.
2. Go to the Insert tab, click Pictures, and select the image you generated with AI.
3. Resize the image to fill most of the slide, leaving some room for a title at the top if you wish. You can do this easily by dragging the corner handles of the image.

It's also helpful to give this a title. Add a text box above the image with a title like "What Am I?" or "Guess the Landmark!"

Step 2: Create the Clickable Cover Grid

This grid is made up of individual shapes that will cover your image.

1. Go to the Insert tab and click on Shapes. Select a Rectangle or Oval.
2. Draw your first shape over one corner of the image. A good starting point is a 4x4 or 5x5 grid, so size the shape accordingly.
3. With the shape selected, go to the Shape Format tab. You can change the Shape Fill and Shape Outline to match your presentation theme. A solid color with a contrasting outline works well.
4. Right-click the shape and select Edit Text. Type the number "1". Center the number and make the font large and easy to read.
5. Now, simply copy and paste that first numbered shape to create the others. Hold the Ctrl key (or Cmd on Mac) while dragging the shape to create an exact copy. Arrange your copies to form a neat grid that completely covers the underlying image.
6. Once your grid is set, go back and edit the text in each shape to number them sequentially (1, 2, 3, etc.).

Step 3: Select and Name Your Objects

This is a crucial, often-skipped step that will save you a massive headache later. Naming your shapes makes identifying them for triggers much easier.

1. Go to the Home tab, find the Editing group on the far right, and click Select >, Selection Pane...
2. The Selection Pane will appear on the right side of your screen, showing a list of every object on the slide (e.g., "Rectangle 1", "Rectangle 2").
3. Click on each object in the pane to see which one it highlights on the slide. Double-click the name in the pane and rename it to something logical, like "Square 1", "Square 2", and so on. This will make linking animations so much smoother.

Step 4: Animate and Trigger the Reveal

Here’s where the magic happens. We'll give each cover shape an "exit" animation and then "trigger" that animation to occur only when that specific shape is clicked.

1. First, enable the Animation Pane by going to the Animations tab and clicking the "Animation Pane" button. This will appear on the right, allowing you to see and manage all your animations.
2. Click on your shape "Square 1" to select it.
3. On the Animations tab, browse the gallery of animations. You need an Exit animation (highlighted in red). "Disappear" is a clean, instant option, while "Fade" or "Fly Out" are also good choices. Select one. You'll see the animation preview and it will appear in your Animation Pane.
4. Now we set the trigger. In the Animation Pane, find the animation you just added for "Square 1". Click the small dropdown arrow next to it and select Timing...
5. A new window will pop up. At the bottom, click the Triggers button.
6. Select the option Start effect on click of: and find the name of the shape you are animating - in this case, "Square 1" - from the dropdown list.
7. Click OK. You'll now see your animation in the Animation Pane sorted under a new "Trigger" section.

Rinse and Repeat: You must do this for every single square on your grid. Select "Square 2", add an exit animation, open Timing settings, and set the trigger to be "Square 2". Continue for Square 3, Square 4, and so on. It's repetitive, but the payoff is a fully interactive game.

Step 5: Test and Refine Your Game

Once you’ve set a trigger for every square, it's time to test it. Go into Slide Show mode by pressing F5 (or clicking the Slide Show icon).

Your cursor should turn into a hand when you hover over the numbered squares. Click on any square, say number 8. Only square number 8 should disappear, revealing the portion of the image underneath. Click on number 3. Only number 3 should disappear. If it works, congratulations! If not, return to the Animation Pane to check that each animation is correctly triggered by its corresponding shape via the Selection Pane.

Level Up Your Game: Customization and Pro Tips

Once you have the basic engine built, you can customize it to make it even more engaging:

• Experiment with Shapes: Instead of rectangles, try a honeycomb pattern using hexagons, or a puzzle look with different interlocking shapes. The process remains exactly the same.
• Add Sound Effects: In the animation Timing window (where you set the triggers), there's a dropdown menu for "Sound." You can add a simple "Click" or fun "Whoosh" sound effect when a square disappears.
• Make it a Template: Once you’ve built a game grid you love, save the file as a PowerPoint Template (.potx). Now, whenever you want to create a new game, you can just start from this template, swap out the background image and title, and you're good to go in minutes.
• Combine with Q&A: For a more challenging game, tell participants they have to answer a question correctly (read by you from your AI-generated list) before they can choose a square to reveal.

Final Thoughts

You have now learned how to build a dynamic, interactive picture reveal game completely within PowerPoint. By leveraging AI to create your visual and textual content, you can streamline the setup and produce a polished, professional activity that grabs your audience's attention and makes your presentations memorable.

Creating this kind of visual story yourself is incredibly rewarding, but sometimes you need to tell stories with data just as quickly. At Bricks, we apply a similar philosophy of speed and ease. We built an AI that can take your raw spreadsheet or CSV data and instantly craft beautiful, interactive dashboards. You simply upload your file, and our AI does the work of visualizing your data and surfacing insights, giving you a presentation-ready report in seconds.