Dixit is a social guessing game in which players try to guess an image from one player’s hint. The game is played in rounds where one player selects a card with an image from their hand and gives a hint corresponding to that image. Then, every other player selects a card from their hand to serve as a distracting decoy, and the real card is shuffled in with the decoys. Players then try to guess which image is the real image, and once everyone has selected, points are awarded: the hint giver is rewarded for players guessing their image, while other players are rewarded for guessing the correct image and for getting opponents to select their decoy card as the real card.
Dixit uses a surreal art style and a thought-connections mechanic to engage the plane of personal thoughts and preconscious conceptual connections. The art on the cards, from which players form hints is drawn in surrealist style, with absurd dreamlike events depicted in flowing paint strokes. In the hint-making and card-choosing phase of the game, the players only look at their hand of five cards, which have no text, borders, or any other visual features detracting from the images. Players’ thoughts are allowed to focus entirely on the images, and because of their surreal nature and the lack of any “grounding” visual elements on the cards, this encourages dreamlike flow of thoughts and immediate preconscious connections. Players can construct hints by thinking of whatever non-obvious connections come to them while looking at the image, and they are rewarded for this, as their goal is to not make the hint so obvious that everyone guesses the card (or else they gain no points).
However, the game also forces players to think about how other players will interpret their hints (or, from a hint, understand which card the hint giver might have meant rather than going to the most obvious card in the guesser’s mind). As a hint giver, you can’t just give a hint based on the flow of ideas in your head, as it usually ends up not being understandable by the players. Instead, you have to shape your hint to trigger a thought process in other players that (you think) will eventually lead back to the card you chose. While you are encouraged to engage in dreamlike unstructured thought, and need to do this to some extent to generate nonobvious ideas for hints, you also have to externalize your thought process and fit it for other players’ thought processes. Likewise, as a guesser, you have to try to project your own connections with a given hint onto the hint giver and decide if that is a logical connection that they would have made. You even have to take into account that the giver is externalizing their thoughts, and try to determine not what their initial thoughts were but what their strategic decision to communicate the card to some but not all of the players was. Through this, and the rotating multilateral tension created by one player each turn having a different role from the rest but each player trying to simultaneously match their thoughts with some players but misguide and deceive others, Dixit turns natural internal thought into deliberate social projection and structuring. While the visual style encourages preconscious trains of connections, the objectives and asymmetric competition of the game forces players to turn their internal process into an external one. This nuance reflects conceptions of the “social dependence” of thought and an individual conscience. Thinkers like Hegel claim that the individual consciousness of thought is in fact dependent on thinking of others and understanding relationships between the self and others; Dixit embodies this concept by turning a seemingly internal process and making its objectives dependent on being able to relate internal thought to the other players.
