Dixit

Dixit, winner of the 2010 Spiel des Jahres award (Family Game of the Year), is a hugely popular party game that’s all about using your imagination. 

The difference here is that this is not a co-operative board game where you are all working together (or there are two teams competing against each other). It’s every person for themselves. To win, be the first to 30 points, or the person with the most points when the deck runs out.

Dixit comes with 84 unique cards, each with wonderful, vivid and sometimes quite surreal artwork on them. Players start with a hand of six cards, and one player will start as the ‘Storyteller’. They will pick one of their cards and describe it in a sentence. This can be as wild, bland, creative or imaginative as they please. Then everyone will discreetly pick a card from their hand that they think best matches that sentence. All cards are shuffled and revealed face-up. Then players have to secretly vote using tokens (which are simultaneously flipped) on which card they think belongs to the Storyteller.

If everyone picks the Storyteller’s card (or if no one guessed right), then everyone scores two points, except the Storyteller. If only some people guessed correctly, then they and the Storyteller score three points. If others pick your own card when you are not the Storyteller, you alone score 1 point per vote for your card. (You are not allowed to vote for your own card!).

Therefore, it quickly becomes a case of the Storyteller having to balance proceedings. If they’re too vague in their descriptions, they risk alienating everyone from guessing their card. But at the same time, they cannot make it too obvious, because then everyone will know it and they’ll score nothing! At the end of each turn, everyone receives a new card to their hand, and then the next player becomes the Storyteller.

Player Count: 3-6
Time: 30 Minutes
Age: 8+