Game Review: Dixit

By Jeremy Anderson

Type/Time/Players: While there are cards and a board, Dixit is a game of social interaction and metaphor. It takes thirty to forty minutes - possibly a little longer with the maximum number of players, which is 6. As with many games, it says it works with just three players but you will enjoy the game more with more players.

The Skinny: Each player gets a hand of six cards, each of which has a lovely painting on it. Players take turns as "the storyteller." This player places a card face-down and says as much or as little as he wishes about the card, generally trying to describe it without being too obvious. The other players then put cards from their hands that they think match the description the storyteller provided. This stack of cards is shuffled together and laid out face up, and players can look over the cards. They then put down tokens declaring which card they think the storyteller put in.

If nobody guesses the storyteller's card, or if everybody guesses the storyteller's card, all the players besides the storyteller get 2 points.

If there's a mix, the storyteller gets 3 points, the people who guessed correctly get 3 points, and each non-storyteller gets a point for each person who guessed their card.

The objectives, then, have three parts:

1. As the storyteller, craft descriptions that will only be clear to some people; descriptions that could be interpreted as your card but aren't obvious.
2. Play cards that match the descriptions of other storytellers.
3. Work out the clues given you by other storytellers.

The Good: This is a game that makes its players think. Moreover, it doesn't make them think about numbers, odds, spatial relations, or clever manipulation of the game's rules (the four kinds of thinking that win you 90% of the games out there). It makes players think about metaphor, language, turn of phrase, and art. It's designed in a way that is easy to learn, original, and infinitely replayable. While it isn't perfectly original (Mad Scientist University, Apples to Apples, and Once Upon a Time are also games based on storytelling and/or metaphor), the objective of getting an idea across to some people but not others is, as far as I know, a Dixit original.

Also, the card art is, by necessity, just plain fun to look at.

The Bad: Try to play somewhere quiet. You can lose a lot of the game's value if you have to shout your description of your card. Also, though it isn't particularly defined in the rules, have just one person as scorekeeper and have him or her move the pieces forward while explaining why they're moving forward. It helps make sure nobody accidentally moves twice.

Conclusions: As you can see from the extremely sparse "the bad" section, there is a good reason Dixit won Game of the Year in 2010 and four Golden Geek Awards (Artwork, Children's Game, Innovative, and Party Game categories) in 2009. It is a game that can help you learn about people as you play with them, and conversely a game that can be enriched by existing relationships; the shared language of friends or culture. If you wanted, you could even require your "storytellers" perform their descriptions of cards in haiku, or interpretive dance.
I haven't seen Dixit 2, but if it does nothing but add more lovely cards I will be plenty satisfied. Because of the way the game is set up, that's all it needs.