Dixit

This weekend we had friends visiting from Montpellier, and as several of them are big board game fans, I got to discover several new ones.

One in particular that worked really well with a group and could be used for bilingual crowds was Dixit. The game comes with pieces for up to 6 players, but you could use thimbles or die for extra place markers and make voting pieces out of paper or cardboard.

The game is rather simple: everyone has 6 cards with creative images on them and each turn one player announces a theme, idea, sentence, or object and puts down a card that illustrates this word/sentence. The other players select a card that fits the theme, the cards are mixed, then turned over. Each player (except the one who announced the theme) votes for the card he or she thinks the first player submitted. You earn points and advance around the board by getting people to vote for your card and by correctly picking the "true" card for the theme. As a twist, the leader of each turn gets points when people vote for him or her, but not if everyone does or no one does. The idea is thus to propose a theme or idea illustrated in the card, but not so perfectly that everyone votes for it.

For some of the turns the themes were simple: love, intelligence, nightmare...
Others were more complex: 'les chemins de la gloire mènent à l'échec", "c'est pas la peine de courir"

We played twice and I did initially think that if I owned the game the same ideas would come every time I played, but our friends assured us that playing with other people exposes you to lots of new ideas and really changes the game.

The game comes with 84 different cards, but if you want to play with 6 or more people, the extender pack of extra cards could be useful. If the votes mean that everyone advances slowly (rather than one player getting lots of votes and moving ahead), you could go through all the cards before finding a winner. I think with 6 people we ran out of new cards to complete the hand of 6 cards during the last 2 turns, but we were able to finish with the cards in hand.

The website has examples of some of the cards if you want to get an idea for the crazy/creative images, and there's also a demonstration of the game. At 29€ it could be a good holiday gift that works in any language!