Tuesday 22 March 2016

Dixit Odyssey - Truly Awesome Game #TipsTuesdays


Welcome to my blog - if you are after my AtoZChallenge Theme Reveal, it's here. Today's Tips Tuesday is a recommendation. On Saturday we went out to dinner with some good friends and two of them stayed over at our house. They brought with them a brilliant game which we played when we got back and I have to tell you all about it. It's so good I immediately went out and bought us our own copy.

Dixit Odyssey
Truly Awesome Game

Now this is a game for between 3 and 12 people, so it suits small families and big groups alike. We played it with four people and it was a lot of fun.

The better you know the people in the group the harder it is :).

You can also buy expansion packs to make the game bigger the more you play it. As you can see the art alone is worth taking a look at.

So I'm guessing you would like to know how to play :). You can download the official rules here in 8 languages if you would like, or you can follow my ramblings :).

  • Everyone chooses a colour and you are given a little rabbit playing piece and a card with 12 holes and depending on how many people are playing, one or two voting pegs (called voting tokens by the game, but they just look like mastermind pegs :)):


  • Each player is dealt 6 picture cards. E.g. :


  • One player each round is the storyteller. They have to choose one of their cards, place it face down on the table and then say or do something to give a clue to the card (and some of these clues are very obscure).
  • All the other players then choose a card from their hands that matches as closely as they can to the clue given and place their cards with the storyteller's card, also face down.
  • The storyteller then shuffles the cards and places them face up around the main score board (which has number positions).
  • The other players then vote on which card they think is the storytellers by secretly putting their pegs in the correct hole on their voting card. If there are more than 7 players you can vote twice if you wish. The only card you cannot under any circumstances vote for is your own - that's cheating.
For example, say I was putting down the rabbit in the spacesuit on the moon, I could say "cream cheese" in hopes someone would get my reference to the moon.

The idea of the game is to get some of the other players to guess your card, but not all. 
  • If everyone gets it or no one gets it then the storyteller gets 0 points and everyone else gets 2 points.
  • If some get it, they and the storyteller get 3 points each.
  • Everyone but the storyteller whose card gets a vote (i.e. they matched the clue well) gets an extra 1 point, up to a max of 3.
  • If you are playing with 7 or more, if you only voted once you get an extra point if you guessed the storyteller's card correctly.
Hence it is a matter of balance - your clues need to be clever, but not too clever. 

I still can't believe no one figured out my card when my clue was "Yggdrasil" - it had a bloody great tree right in the middle of it. I don't expect everyone to know about Norse mythology, but I expected my husband to remember, given how many times I've made him sit through Thor and Thor the Dark World! You just can't rely on people some times ;)
  • After each turn you take another card from the pack starting with whoever is the next round to be the storyteller.
The winner is the first player to 30 points :).

As you can see from the examples, the cards are very abstract and you can give any kind of clue you like. It's a lot of fun and I whole heartedly recommend it. I intend to make the family play it on Easter Sunday :)

Do you have any board games you absolutely love?

6 comments:

  1. OO - now I'm looking forward to this! :) We might have to play on the same team, though, or we might have an unfair advantage.

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    1. I was thinking that - but we could try and see ;)

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  2. This game actually sounds awesome! I love board games. Recently learned Five Tribes. It was very cool. It is slightly like Catan in that there are different ways to earn points - but more complex. And though it's a points game it is hard to tell who's winning until the end! It can be surprising. I am creating a bunch of board games of my own slowly but surely. It's important to me that they all be original, fun and potentially humorous. I'm very curious how many different picture cards come with this game.

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    1. 84 image cards in the initial box and you can buy expansions packs. You can see all the images in the pdfs here: http://en.libellud.com/games/dixit-odyssey#tabs-3

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  3. Wow, that sounds like an awesome game! ~Lori~

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    1. It is - so much fun to play. There are also variations you can play too, so if you get bored with one version you can change it up.

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