Monthly Archives: March 2020

Game Review: Dixit

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Six image cards include: a six-sided die with black tendrils emerging from the top, a white cradle in a forest of thorns, a giant woman gazing down on a small boat, a cat staring at a mouse in a birdcage under a crescent moon, an old-fashioned balance scale on a dark purple background, and an arm emerging from a stormy sea holding a torch under a cloudy sky
A sample hand in Dixit

First question: Which of these cards from your hand best fits the descriptor “darkness?”


Next question: Can you identify the card for which the active player chose that descriptor from a group of decoys?

Final question: If so, did you provide a sufficiently convincing match for the active player’s description to get other players’ votes and thus, bonus points?

This is Dixit, a game we played while visiting family. We tend to fill spare (or stolen) time with board games when we get together. I knew I would come home with a subject for my next play journal, and the trip did not disappoint. We particularly enjoyed the art and open-endedness of this game. 

The role of “active player” rotates around the group, as each player has the opportunity to choose a card out of their hand of six cards, describe it well enough to get some votes, but hopefully not so well that everyone guesses it, and lays their card, art side down, in the middle of the table. We used single-word descriptions, but the instructions leave room for interpretation on that point. When I looked online to verify rules, I noticed that one source refers to the active player as the “storyteller,” and suggests telling a one-sentence story about the image, which would add significant challenge.

Midgame score snapshot
Scoreboard with markers

After hearing the clue, other players choose a card of their own to match the description, and pile theirs with the active player’s card. Once everyone has contributed, the active player lays the images face up alongside the score board, aligning images to voting numbers. 

Players vote by submitting a number tile face down. Each player’s number tiles are a different color, to match their rabbit-shaped play marker. Number tokens are flipped to reveal votes. 

Voted tiles on three cards
Voted pictures
A quick-start reminder of scoring rules for Dixit
Rules reminder included on the scoreboard

Scoring depends primarily on the active player’s success in description. If either no players or all the players correctly choose the active player’s card, the active player gets 0 points and all others receive 2 points. If nobody guesses correctly, other players also receive 1 point for each incorrect vote for their image. If some, but not all, of the other players correctly choose the active player’s image, the active player gets three points and only the players that guess correctly receive an additional point for every incorrect guess for their image. Score is tracked by moving the rabbit tokens along the score board, which includes a handy scoring guide. Players draw a replacement card and play continues until someone reaches 30 points.

The game accommodates 3-6 players and gives a target age of 8+. We played with three adults, plus an 8-, a 10-, and a 13-year-old. The overall design of the game is elegant and robust. Most of us were novices to the game, and everybody mastered gameplay rapidly. We had so much fun that I don’t actually remember who won. This was the type of game for which the fun of playing far outweighed the actual outcome. It appeals to different interests for varying reasons. Art enthusiasts can enjoy the vivid, surreal pictures. Wordsmiths will revel in the challenge of picking exactly the right descriptive word or phrase. Players that like the challenge of misleading opponents will relish the opportunity to supplant the active player’s card with their alternative offering. 

Game progress overview - scoreboard plus voted images
Completed round snapshot

As we played Dixit, I thought about the ways in which it would be accessible to a broad audience, and audiences for whom it is not accessible. (Salen, 2008) With a completely pictorial basis, the game requires no reading, and could even be played across languages. Players only need a way to communicate descriptions to each other, including even a common language at a rudimentary level. Players without a shared language could use a phone app or bilingual dictionary to translate words or phrases. An obvious limitation would be that the game is not presently accessible to people with visual impairments. All the cards and tiles feel identical. On the other hand, Dixit is an interesting candidate for the Build a Better Book (BBB) project, a UC-Boulder project that creates multi-modal media items like picture books and games. 

A set of paperboard tiles with the numbers 1-6 printed on them.
Voting tiles

Last summer, my library hosted a series of teen programs to create 26 tactile-accessible alphabet tiles after attending a BBB workshop. The ingenuity that young people can demonstrate in creating finger-friendly pictures was quite inspiring. The cards could be re-created with Swell Touch Paper in a setting that owns appropriate equipment, then enhanced with further texturing or Braille descriptions. Tiles could also be recreated or enhanced with Braille numbers. For a version we could create in my library makerspace, we could use our CNC router on uniformly shaped wooden tiles to create outlines, then use an assortment of textured materials to enhance the pictures and create a story on each tile. We could base the pictures on the original game, or create an entirely novel set of “cards” to play with, and the goal of the BBB project is to make the items equally accessible to sighted and visually-impaired users. Creating pictures that are appealing and interpretable both visually and through touch results in fascinating products.

The process of creating this new interpretation of the game could be a natural demonstration of the topics explored by Horst, Herr-Stephenson, and Robinson (2010) and Gee (2005) in their explorations of how young people engage with learning and hobbies. Participants may become involved in the project from an interest in one or more of the technologies involved in the creation process, a desire to help their community or friends and loved ones that may benefit from the end products, a need for community service hours to fulfill a set of external requirements, or simply because the project interests them. Various members of the group may have facility or knowledge of some parts of the process, and the group can learn from each others’ areas of expertise or ingenuity. Participants that know 3D modeling or the CNC router may have ideas to streamline creation processes with those machines. Group members that have a loved one with visual impairments may have insight on characteristics that make tactile representations more effective. All members may create novel uses for provided materials or equipment, especially through continued exploration and interactions.

In addition to the technical learning that takes place through re-interpretation of Dixit as described above, the original game provides several natural opportunities for formal or informal learning. In a foreign language class, even introductory classes could use the game to practice vocabulary as students describe their cards and attempt to understand the descriptions of others. Descriptions could be given verbally, written, or in both formats, depending on the skills being practiced. If writing, a mini-whiteboard and marker might be valuable to pass to the active player so they can write the word large enough for everyone to easily see. In an English class, or another class learning parts of speech, the game could be used to practice by restricting possible descriptions to a single part of speech, either rotating among them, or limited to the current area of study. I could see nouns, adjectives, and verbs all being good descriptors, though prepositions or adverbs might be more difficult. In a creative writing class, students could write entire short stories about either a single card or a selection of cards. I have minimal knowledge of art concepts from a teaching standpoint, but it seems likely this game could be enjoyable and valuable in an art classroom. For social-emotional skills, this is a way to explore how the people around you think, as you see what facets of a card you and they notice or choose to describe. Most of the images are sufficiently complicated to leave plenty of room for interpretation. Dixit is a fun way to connect with people, and has plenty of opportunity for further discussion about the pictures, how players see them, and how best to capture them in minimalist form. I suspect the game will be a perennial favorite on future visits.  

Dixit box side and starting score markers
Starting out
Backs of the cards

References

Gee, J. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: From The Age of Mythology to today’s schools. In D. Barton & K. Tusting (Eds.), Beyond Communities of Practice: Language Power and Social Context (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives, pp. 214-232). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511610554.012

Horst, H. A., Herr-Stephenson, B., and Robinson, L. (2010). Media Ecologies. In M. Ito, Hanging out, messing around, geeking out (pp. 29-78). The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Retrieved from: mitp-content-server.mit.edu:18180/books/content/sectbyfn  

Salen, K. (2008). Toward an ecology of gaming. In K. Salen (Ed.)The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (pp. 1-20). The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Retrieved from: lorishyba.pbworks.com/f/salen_ecology.pdf

Game Review: Seeker’s Notes

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I deeply love playing board games with family and friends, but it is not my most common setting for game play, largely due to difficulties involved in getting multiple schedules aligned for such interactions. For frequency, my most common outlet is a hidden objects game app on my mobile phone. The game is called Seeker’s Notes and can easily monopolize a couple of hours if I am not careful. 

Digitally stylized picture of the back of a person's head looking at a mobile phone in their hand.

The game is built around a story with the player as the protagonist, attempting to help townspeople in a village that has been isolated by a curse and a deadly mist. Personally, I find the plot to be contrived and beside the point and I enjoy the game for its intricate art as well as the almost-meditative feel to finding hidden objects in beautiful scenes.

As the game begins, players have a relatively small group of locales to explore, including the train station, café, and mayor’s office. As a player continues, they unlock new locations and receive new missions for those settings. Initial goals in a new location are in the neighborhood of 10 hidden items, and as a player gains skill with repeated searches, goals increase in terms of how many items are sought to complete the location. By later levels, players find 20-30 items per search, within a three-minute time frame. Scenes are densely packed with lots of detail and an assortment of items to seek. Each item tends to have about five or so common places it is found, but somehow the searches can still remain challenging due to the sheer number of possible combinations of items and places. 

In addition to the hidden object challenges, there are also a few other types of puzzles including card-matching (memory style,) jumbled picture reassembly, and tile-switching. As a location or puzzle attempt is finished, players earn various components that can then be combined to create talismans to ease game play, trade items to swap for energy, collections that complete missions, and other reward items. Game progress occurs in multiple directions. A player’s overall level in the game increases as they gain experience points with successful explorations and mission accomplishments. Within each location, levels also increase with successful completions. As levels increase, players find more objects or otherwise demonstrate advancing skills to continue to make progress in the game. There are daily goals as well, including things like searching a particular location or search mode a set number of times, or finding a given number of specific game items. The game also typically has about a one-month cycle of “special events,” where the newest location is energetically cheap to explore, and there are new challenges every week or so, valid for just the given time span. 

A player chooses the location they want to explore from the stylized map, and each location cycles through a variety of styles of search, including finding items based on a text description, jumbled words, or a silhouette image of the item, looking in only a small section at a time, while the rest of the scene is obscured by “night,” finding matching pairs, or finding objects that are “morphing” between shapes. You can earn or purchase tools to make searches more successful by pointing out a missing item or adding time to your clock. 
On occasion, locations are occupied by an “anomaly,” such as increased speed of time passage, dark clouds floating across the scene, or only getting one item to search for at a time, rather than the usual four. Anomalies burn significantly more energy to explore a location, but result in more experience points when successfully completed. When a player runs out of energy, they cannot explore again until their energy replenishes sufficiently for a given location, either through waiting while it gains a point every three minutes, or using food items found or gained as rewards in various challenges. 

Of course, there are also plenty of options to use real-world money to purchase talismans, food, energy, and other attributes in the game. Ads pop up routinely between searches, and they would undeniably speed success, but I am able to play the game effectively without any purchases. If that were not the case, I would have likely given up the game long ago. 

While I typically play the game solo, I have occasionally shared a session with my husband or children. The biggest drawback to doing so is the small screen on a phone. It is hard to look at it jointly for any extended period without knocking heads together. Several years ago, my husband had downloaded several hidden object games onto an older computer, and we enjoyed playing them together and searching for items as a team, so I have participated in the genre as a joint project. My husband grew up playing video games and has quite a bit of expertise with controllers and complicated game mechanics, so in most games we play together, he takes the role of coach, as was demonstrated to be a common gender pattern by Siyahhan and Gee (2016). In hidden object games, we are on much more even footing, as the basic mechanic is merely to click on or touch the hidden items and a good eye or recognizing vocabulary can be equally beneficial. In most video games, we play with him in the role of expert and me as an apprentice, but in hidden object games, it is much more collaborative as we exchange knowledge and trade roles of recognizing an unusual item or term. (Stevens, 2008) 

At that time, we noticed that most of the games had lovely artwork and occasionally surprising terminology for search items, a trend that continues with Seeker’s Notes. This can make for some interesting vocabulary lessons such as in the setting “Candy World,” where one of the search items is “champignons.” I knew just enough French to recognize that I was looking for mushrooms, but did not realize until I looked it up that apparently the word can also be used in English to specifically describe button mushrooms. A “horse” can be a life-like figurine or statuette, or sometimes, a rocking horse or hobbyhorse (stick with a mock horse head on it.) A model ship in a bottle is sometimes called a “ship” and sometimes a “bottle.” This ambiguity gives some practice with more flexible thinking as a player learns to be open to multiple interpretations of a given term while searching. A quick look at company info shows the creator company, MYTONA, is based in Russia, which lines up with what I remember finding when we used to download them and were curious about interesting verbiage in their productions. I do not know if it is a common Russian industry, or if we just happen to be drawn to a particular style dominated by Russian artists. 

As I initially started thinking about this game, I had no ideas for educational purposes for it, as I don’t consider it a particularly instructive game on the surface. However, as I thought further about it, I realized it could actually be a good demonstration in a psychology or marketing class exploring motivation and “stickiness” of games or activities. (Liu, 2016) A new goal every day and repetitive, easily mastered basic aspects of the game encourage a player to connect with it on a daily basis. The month-long goals are extremely challenging (but probably not quite impossible) to achieve without using some of the paid features, which could also be considered cheats as in the Stevens (2008) article.

As I thought further, I also realized that while I wouldn’t use this precise game for it, the overall style of hidden pictures or seek-and-find could be (and probably has been) used for various training or educational purposes that involve recognizing a particular pattern. I could see creating a pre-lab exercise early in the school year asking students to identify and describe a solution for unsafe situations in a picture of a sample laboratory. In an occupational safety training, a similar model could be beneficial for training workers to recognize potential hazards on a worksite. For a history or language arts class, perhaps a picture including anachronisms or items that do not belong in a given story or setting and asking students to find and explain why they do not fit. 

Having recently worked with some chemistry students on molecular geometry and remembering how I struggled with it in organic chemistry, I feel like an electronic game version could provide a great opportunity for students to be exposed to many molecules and practice recognizing properly shaped vs. unlikely configurations in a more gameful, less pressure-filled setting than the usual difficulties of first mastering the prescribed 3-dimensional drawing method,then attempting to decide how things will orient themselves, which can be long, tedious, and difficult for novices to master. In learning to first recognize them in models, ideally rotatable, in an online format, there would be a lower barrier to entry, increasing the likelihood of being willing to try. Secondly, when looking through many takes a matter of minutes rather than a single model taking minutes just to draw, students may be more willing to spend more time engaged with the task. In addition, as they practice, they are likely to find themselves recognizing patterns they may not even initially be able to describe but will give them enhanced success and a feeling of progression. (Bell, 2018) As they become more comfortable with available configurations and how molecules arrange themselves, translating that knowledge back into a particular method of drawing and making predictions may become significantly more manageable. 


References:

Bell, K. (2018). Game on!: Gamification, gameful design, and the rise of the gamer educator. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press.

Liu, H. (2016, October 6) “Do this one thing to make your product sticky” Retrieved from: https://medium.com/startup-grind/do-this-one-thing-to-make-your-product-sticky-aa8ed6d55797

Siyahhan, S. and Gee, E. “Understanding gaming and gender within the everyday lives of Mexican-American family homes” in Kafai, Y. B., et al (Eds.) Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional perspectives and inclusive designs in gaming. (pp. 92-104) Retrieved from: https://via.hypothes.is/http://remikalir.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/SiyahhanGee2016.pdf#annotations:r_kS6Fv1EeqMJZ-Cn3IXnQ 

Stevens, R., T. Satwicz, and L. McCarthy (2008). “In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives.” in Salen, K. (Ed.)The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. (pp. 41–66.) doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.041