Dixit Review

My new favorite game is Dixit. It is this cool game, originally from France, in which everyone has a hand of cards with fanciful illustrations on them, and one player has to say something (a word, a phrase, a sentence, a sound effect) and place one of their cards face down. Everyone else adds a card to try to fool the other players into picking their card. I find that the trick is to pick a card that is close to the theme, but not too obvious about it. The "storyteller" player wants to get neither all of the players to choose his card nor none of the players. Something in between earns him three points. Players who pick his card earn points. Players whose card is picked by others earn points (which allow the players to move their rabbit pieces around the board). The first to the finish wins.

Gameplay resembles a combination of Apples to Apples and Balderdash, but, in my opinion, Dixit is a much better game. It's a fun and unique challenge. The artwork is gorgeous. Everyone I've played with seems to love this game. Also, you don't just have to take my word for it. Dixit was recently awarded the coveted Spiel des Jahres award, so the Germans like it too.

If you want more Dixit cards (as I expect you eventually will), you can get them through an expansion pack: Dixit 2.



UPDATE: There is now a third Dixit set: Dixit Odyssey. It is not just an expansion pack. It includes 84 more cards, a board, and all the necessary tokens. The rules has have been slightly tweaked, and there are also now variant rules that allow for, up to 12 players to play, either in Team variation or a streamlined Party variation. The box is big enough to hold the cards from all three Dixit games.

It's been over a year since I first played Dixit, and I still get excited about playing it. I think Dixit is destined to be one of those classic, mainstay games.

Stupid Bananagrams tricks: Word grid with mirror symmetry

I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to make a perfectly symmetric Bananagrams word grid using all 144 Bananagrams tiles. I decided to use mirror symmetry, so a word spelled out horizontally on the left hand side would have to be reversed on the right hand side and yet still spell a real word. Can it be done? Let's find out.

First, I consulted my letter distribution for Bananagrams to see which letters occurred an odd number of times in a Banangrams set. For instance, there are three W tiles, so I knew that at least one (and possibly all three) would have to occur on the center line of the grid to maintain mirror symmetry.

I then tried to build those letters into vertical words. Next I built some horizontal palindromes off of those center-line words. I got some good palindromic words from Wiktionary.

Finally, I worked on linking everything up. This step took the longest time. Fortunately, I found a list of words, that when reversed, yield different English words (like "tuba" and "abut"). These are called "semordnilaps". I particularly liked the ERGO/OGRE pair, so I managed to work that one into my grid. After a lot of fiddling around, I wound up with the grid shown below.

C H GAG R M OH E HO I MADAM I N A A N KNOW WONK E B E U EYE U R R R R OGRE ERGO BUN NUB O O X J P J X RECAPS A SPACER S I L V L I S L A E A L T T Q DEIFIED Q U A L A U I Z O Z I TIDE EWE EDIT V O O V Y TIN NIT Y F T F STATS D

Voila! The world's first palindromic Bananagrams grid!