CHENNAI: Games that offer players the opportunity for clever plays are often the ones that tend to maintain their appeal as the years go by. Dixit is a game that thrives on that potential, as well as being a game that’s best when played by people who know each other really well.
The game itself consists a boatload of beautifully-illustrated cards, and seriously, you’ve got to see these to fully appreciate them. Whimsical, abstract, trippy — they’re all of these and more besides. Each round, one player becomes the ‘storyteller’ and must select a card from their hand and play it face down while giving everybody else a clue about that card. The clue could be a word, a sentence, a fragment of a song — anything you like. Everybody else then selects a card from their hand that matched the clue and plays them face down on top of the original. Shuffle up the cards, lay them out randomly and then the guessing begins.
As players, you’re trying to figure out which card was the storyteller’s originally because that’s how you score points. You know the card you played, so that eliminates one option, but you’ve still got to use the clue to figure out which one it must be. Everybody makes their guesses in secret and then reveals simultaneously for the moment of truth.
How scoring works in Dixit is nothing short of genius. As a storyteller, you’re walking a tightrope — if your clue’s too obvious and everybody guesses your card, they score points and you score nothing. However, if it’s too vague and nobody guesses correctly...the same thing happens! So you need at least one player to guess successfully but not all of them.
Muddying the waters considerably are the cards the other players chose, some of which might better suit your clue than the one you originally played. Any player who played a card good enough to trick other players into selecting that as the original gets a point for each incorrect guess; which is a wonderful little addition to the rules that makes everybody fully invested at every point in the game.
Board games are a lovely hobby largely because of the interpersonal connection you form with other players at the table, and Dixit both leans on that connection and turns it up to 11. That moment of exultation when you realise that one of your friends managed to successfully decipher an incredibly obscure reference that you used as a clue — that can be magical. Those punch-the-air moments come around often enough to make Dixit a genuinely fulfilling game to play with your friends and family, and are reason enough for it to be in your collection.