LogFAQs > #934069911

39. Dixit (2008)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Party game, clue-giving, separate hands
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 1
Game length: 30 minutes
Experience: 5+ plays (2015-2018) with 5-6 players
Previous ranks: 43/100 (2016), 43/80 (2018)

Summary - Every player has a handful of cards with nice, surreal art on them (like an angry dragon in a kitchen). The storyteller ("active player") chooses one and places it face-down and says something about the card ("my current mood"). Each other player then submits a card face-down to be mixed together, and then everyone except the storyteller guesses which card was the storyteller's. Points are awarded to the storyteller if some (but not all) players guess correctly, while points are awarded to each player who guessed correctly or misled others to pick their card.

Design - Dixit is simple and has become a modern classic. The game's replayability, like Mysterium's, is in some ways limited by its beautiful art on its gigantic cards. However, Dixit is game-ier than Mysterium and more replayable with its pictures, because you can't establish the same meta of "this card means this." Dixit's core conceit is ingenious: you want to give an accurate clue, but not too accurate. This can result in some bizarrely vague clues that lead to "oops" moments when your metaphorical sentence gets undercut by multiple people who play much better literal interpretations. A sure thing when you guess can turn out to be dead wrong. The same card will never get the same clue with the same people, because everyone should know it at that point.

The tradeoff on connecting well and laughing is that sometimes you're kind of shut out from the benefits. My biggest frustration from Dixit probably comes on turns when I guess wrong and no one guesses my card. This can happen fairly often if you lack "good" cards and you guess wrong, but that can happen multiple turns in a row before you become the guesser again. It's not really anyone's fault and can be a bit sour-feeling.

Experience - Even I'm a little puzzled why I have Dixit ranked this high. That said, like When I Dream, you can have bad hands but the overall play of a game of Dixit is usually pretty solid. Dixit is a bit more crowd-dependent than other games; you can learn a bit about how people's brains work, but if those brains aren't interesting to you, you'll probably prefer to explore your good friends' minds instead.

Future - I don't have a ton of desire to play Dixit, but won't really say no. It's best with a larger number of players, which we don't hit that often, and those players don't usually bring Dixit.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness