Dixit

 

Dixit

Designer	Jean-Louis Roubira
Publisher	Libellud
Age rating	8+
Time	30 min
Players	3-6
Fun	4/5
Complexity	3/5

Dixit – an absolutely gorgeous game that relies heavily on your imagination, and that of your fellow players. If you don’t like dice, counters, and walls of text, this one is for you. Even if you do like all of those things, you should definitely try Dixit.

 

The main selling point of this game are 84 dreamily illustrated oversized cards, and with good reason. Each one of these represents a person, place or a thing, but always with a deeper meaning. You could take a look at one card and stare at it for minutes, coming up with various associations and evoking feelings, and then have them be completely different from what another player might see.

 

This is where Dixit shines. It is a creative exploration of imagination. Even the tokens, which represent bunnies, for some reason, hop around on a meadow full of flowers, and across a flowing stream to reach their final goal. Everything about this game feels like a meditating dream.

Coming back to the real world, the rules are somewhat easy to explain. The aforementioned bunnies serve as your tokens, and the main goal is to get them from start to end, which sounds simple enough. You move them by getting points. How do you get points? Well, here is where it gets interesting.

Every turn, one of the players is the storyteller, who chooses a card from his or her hand and tries to describe it. You can use a word, a sentence, a rhyme, even a song. The other players then choose a card from their hands that best fits the given description. When all the cards are face down and shuffled, they are revealed. Then comes the interesting part – seeing who can guess the storyteller’s card.

 

This deceivingly simple mechanic has a catch – you cannot make your associations too simple or too vague. If everyone guesses your card, or if no one guesses it, you get zero points. Therefore, if you see a boy fighting a dragon, saying “warrior” might make it too easy, and saying “the sun is slowly setting for us all” will just confuse everyone, no matter how well you can show it correlates to the card.

The gameplay also largely depends on the type of people you play with. Unfortunately, some people are either lacking in imagination, or refuse to take the game seriously, which is why Dixit sessions can be annoying to them. This very rarely happens, however, and most often the associations are interesting, and can become hilarious as well. 

As the bunnies advance after each round, you can easily tell if you are trailing behind, or if you have a good chance to win. There is no easy way to get back on track. Unless you are the storyteller, the rest of the turns depends on other players and their creativity. Another slight problem is this – the more people, the more fun. In my experience, with 5 players it works beautifully.

 

To put it harshly, Dixit never gets boring, unless you do. It is limited only by your imagination, and if you put yourself in the skin of an ancient storyteller, gathering your tribe members by the fire and telling them the story of a cat that tried to reach the moon, you are sure to get a lot of fun from it. 

 

Overall, Dixit is a game that I would recommend to anyone. Every new card will be a marvel to behold, and every new association will have you surprised at what they can represent. So play Dixit, and use some of the most beautifully designed cards in board games to weave a wonderful world.