Table Top Fun - Dixit

What do you get when you combine interpretive and communications skills, voting and creepy pictures? Dixit, that’s what!

Everything you need to start confusing your friends with cryptic messages!

Dixit is a card based game that is for three to six players (though with a little modification, more can join in) where the object of the game is to describe an image unseen to your opponents in the hope that only some of them will recognise it. Yes, only some. If nobody guesses the picture, or everybody does, then they all get points and you end up with nothing. The game ends when all the cards have been used (where the highest scorer wins) or somebody gets to thirty points.

If you retain your sanity upon seeing these cards in your hand while playing drunk, you get bonus points!

An example round would go as follows:

• Five cards are dealt face down to each player.
• The first player – the storyteller – chooses a card to describe verbally to the other players. They ideally want to describe it in such a way as to make it recognisable, but not too recognisable – remember, if everyone guesses the picture, you get no points.
• The storyteller puts the card face down on the table and describes it to the other players.
• Each of the other players them must pick a card from their own deck that they feel most closely matches the description given. They each place this card face down on the table.
• Once every player has submitted a card, they are shuffled and turned over. Each player has to vote on which card they think is the one the storyteller was describing.
• Once all votes have been placed, the storyteller reveals their card.
• If every other player or no other players voted on it, then the storyteller gets no points and all other players get two points.
• If some players guessed correctly, then the storyteller gets three points for each vote their card received and the players who correctly guessed get three points also.
• If any votes were cast for a card not chosen by the storyteller, then the player who submitted said card receives one point per vote.
• The used cards are discarded and everyone picks another card from the face-down pack. The player to the left of the first player now becomes the storyteller, and the process begins again.

As a party game, this has the advantage of not relying on dice rolls or devious tactics – both of which tend to prove difficult after a few hours of the parties I attend. Instead, players have to rely on their skills of artistic interpretation and communication, which is a model I rarely see in board games. It’s tremendous fun and also gets you thinking about how to subtly let your opponents know what you’re thinking, as opposed to trying to throw them off. Of course, you have to balance it and not be too obvious, otherwise you’ll lose very quickly and very badly at this game.

This means that it’s probably a difficult game to play with a group of strangers, as many of the strategies rely on you knowing how your fellow players tick in order to come up with the most cryptic description you can while expecting at least somebody in your party to understand it. On the other hand, it’s quite broad-reaching; young children and older adults would likely be on an even playing field with a game like this.

Rabbits are well-known for their propensity to leap onto lily pads.

The scoreboard is nicely made and utilises wooden pieces shaped like bunny rabbits for no apparent reason. Really, I don’t understand why rabbits were chosen. Why not frogs, given the board? To be honest, they could have been cars, quill pens or giraffes for all it matters to the game. The voting pieces and fonts used throughout the game parts are suitably surrealist and match the overall design of each card, giving the game a unique look.

This one's just about to. Honest. It's eyeing the lily pad that's out of shot.

The cards are clearly specifically designed so that several of them can be interpreted in similar ways; it’s not often that you will just have to toss any card you don’t fancy having to describe into the voting pile in lieu of being able to find anything in your deck that matches the storyteller’s description. The art design is very abstract, very sinister, has several interpretations, and is sinister. Did I mention they were sinister? Some of the artwork is guaranteed to give you nightmares. When I played this game with friend, a lot of the fun was derived simply from the occasionally terrifying cards we got in our decks.

Quick quiz - which of the above would have given me nightmares as a child?
Answer: All of them.

This won the Spiel Des Jahres award (Germany’s ‘Game of the Year’) in 2010, so it has clearly achieved the impressive feat of intriguing hard-core gamers while being accessible to so many different types of game players. The instructions give an age of eight and upwards, but I suspect that decision had more to do with the frightening artwork than the game itself; children younger than this would be able to grasp the concept and rules of this game.

Overall, I found this to be an enjoyable game with a broad appeal, but still challenging enough to hold players’ interest. Also, it’s a game that manages to become more interesting when players get increasingly drunk, as opposed to more frustrating. No wonder the Germans love it!