In the Eye of the Beholder

I've talked before about how my friends and I are always on the hunt for good "group" games. Even though we already have an all-time favorite in Time's Up, it does seem that as long as you have a group to play them, more variety in this category of game is never a bad thing.

Not too long ago, one of my friends picked up a game called Dixit. It might be a stretch to call it a "party game," because it caps out at six players. You could allow more, but you'd have to make your own extra bits, and I'm pretty sure the quality of the game would suffer. Still, it's the sort of socially-oriented, light-weight rules, easy-to-play kind of game that one normally thinks of as a party game.

The game revolves around a deck of cards, each with a different illustration. They're all fairly detailed, but not literal depictions of any given scene. (Unless that scene is the sort of non-sensical thing someone might dream about.) When your turn comes, you choose one image from your hand of six cards, and say a word (or words, or a short sentence) to describe the card as you place it face down in front of you.

Each other player then looks at his own hand and selects the card he thinks best fits that description. You shuffle this small pile of one card from each player, then turn each face up and assign it a number. All your opponents then vote (secretly and simultaneously) on which card they think was the original.

So basically, Apples to Apples with art. And perhaps with a touch of Balderdash, due to some interesting scoring. As you'd expect, each player gets points for guessing the right answer, and points for having the wrong answer they offered up guessed by an opponent. But you, the clue giver, only score if your true answer is guessed by at least one player... but not by every player. So you want to craft a clue that is solid enough for one person (ideally, only one person) to guess, but opaque enough for people to be able to provide viable wrong answers to confuse most of the group.

It's rather fun and quick to play. (You can be thinking about the clue you'll give next from the cards in your hand, during other players' turns.) It's also dirt simple to explain. All good marks for this sort of game. But I do wonder about the replay value over the long haul. We haven't really played Dixit all that much in our group, and that may be just as well. I think familiarity with the limited deck of picture cards might risk leeching some of the fun out of the game. Sure, players could give increasingly weirder clues each time they play again. They could even give clues that they know might describe other cards they've seen in past games, hoping that someone else has that card in their hand. Still, it seems like these cards won't last nearly as long as a box of Balderdash clues, for example.

I'd say if you're in the market for a group game, and have creative people in that group (though not necessarily "outgoing" people -- if you have those, get Time's Up), you might want to take a look at Dixit.