If you haven’t heard of Dixit, the newest trend in story telling card games, this may seem like an uncomfortable exercise from your psychology class.
The boy next to me just performed an interpretive dance that mirrored the tap dancing penguins from "Mary Poppins." I looked down at my cards and asked myself which one of these reminded me of the penguins from Mary Poppins. As my eyes surveyed the six cards in my hand, they fixated on the card with a two headed mermaid that held an umbrella and wore a mustache and a monocle. If this doesn’t say tap dancing penguins, I don’t know what does. I removed the card, placed it face down with the rest of the cards and patiently waited for the reveal.
Dixit offers insight into the minds of your friends. Impressively, Dixit won the German game of the year award, Spiel des Jahres, in 2010. It combines the best of both Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity by allowing players the opportunity for creative expression, but, unlike Cards Against Humanity, it isn’t weird to play with your mom.
The card deck is composed of hundreds of striking surrealist images that are almost impossible to describe. Imagine all of your dreams since childhood illustrated on a 3-by-5 inch card. Pictures of daisy fields, underwater utopias and giant teddy bears are only a small representation of the beautiful cards in Dixit. It is these images and the creative mind of the players which makes this game unique and exciting. Every time the game is played there are new stories to be told and discovered.
The goal of the game is to be obscure, but not so obscure that no one can understand you. Each player takes his or her turn to be the story teller. The objective is to describe one card in your hand by either announcing a phrase, word, sentence, singing a song or performing a physical expression of the image. The rest of the players then select a card in their hands that they believe matches the description. The players then vote on what card they think is the story teller’s. The story teller loses either if every player guesses the card or if none of the players guess the card; the story teller wins if at least one player guesses the card correctly. Each card that receives a vote, but does not belong to the story teller, receives an extra point. The points are tracked by tiny colorful bunnies that hop along a numbered path to the finish line.
Now it is my turn to be the story teller. One of the cards in my hand looks like a totem pole with different animals carved into the surface. I will use this one. I stand up, sing the “Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontas, sit down and cross my fingers that my poor vocal skills don’t cause me to lose.