My preference is for games that can be played with people who are new to them (i.e. don’t have hordes of fiddly tokens or large numbers of separate rules/mechanics), and that don’t demand you do the thing under time pressure (as with ‘party’ games like Articulate/Pictionary)
Some favourites have been Cockroach Poker (simple card game of bluffs and lies and reading people), Camel Up (betting game around a simulated camel race, with enough chaos to how they move to make explicitly calculating your best move a fool’s errand), and Dixit (love the art and free-association of it)
Honorable mentions to Discworld: Ankh Morpork, Photosynthesis, Smash Up, and Small World. Although at least some of those veer into the realm of fiddly tokens.
I strongly prefer Mysterium to Dixit because it is fully cooperative.
I like Dixit, but the game gets much worse when put under optimization pressure. When the clue-giver is trying to maximize their points (and minimize the points of their opponents), the ideal outcome is that exactly one other player guesses their card. Giving a very vague clue will yield near-guessing, which results in one correct guess in expectation, but with high variance; if no one guesses correctly you lose out on points, and many people might guess correctly which raises the scores of your opponents. This means that as the clue giver you want to give a clue that you know only one person at the table will answer correctly, which typically means a clue rooted in an extremely obscure reference. When people adopt this strategy, the majority of the players at the table are simply guessing about which card to submit and guess, and the only player really “playing” the game is the clue-giver. I try not to give obscure references, and instead go with very vague hints to have as much fun playing the game as I can, but it irks me that the strategy that wins is not a strategy that produces maximum fun.
In contrast, the clue giver in Mysterium is simply trying to maximize the amount of information conveyed to the other players and working around the limited channel they have available to them.
This means that as the clue giver you want to give a clue that you know only one person at the table will answer correctly, which typically means a clue rooted in an extremely obscure reference.
We typically play that this is not allowed, unless you’re targeting your reference at the player in last place.
My preference is for games that can be played with people who are new to them (i.e. don’t have hordes of fiddly tokens or large numbers of separate rules/mechanics), and that don’t demand you do the thing under time pressure (as with ‘party’ games like Articulate/Pictionary)
Some favourites have been Cockroach Poker (simple card game of bluffs and lies and reading people), Camel Up (betting game around a simulated camel race, with enough chaos to how they move to make explicitly calculating your best move a fool’s errand), and Dixit (love the art and free-association of it)
Honorable mentions to Discworld: Ankh Morpork, Photosynthesis, Smash Up, and Small World. Although at least some of those veer into the realm of fiddly tokens.
If you like Dixit, you might also want to check out Mysterium.
I strongly prefer Mysterium to Dixit because it is fully cooperative.
I like Dixit, but the game gets much worse when put under optimization pressure. When the clue-giver is trying to maximize their points (and minimize the points of their opponents), the ideal outcome is that exactly one other player guesses their card. Giving a very vague clue will yield near-guessing, which results in one correct guess in expectation, but with high variance; if no one guesses correctly you lose out on points, and many people might guess correctly which raises the scores of your opponents. This means that as the clue giver you want to give a clue that you know only one person at the table will answer correctly, which typically means a clue rooted in an extremely obscure reference. When people adopt this strategy, the majority of the players at the table are simply guessing about which card to submit and guess, and the only player really “playing” the game is the clue-giver. I try not to give obscure references, and instead go with very vague hints to have as much fun playing the game as I can, but it irks me that the strategy that wins is not a strategy that produces maximum fun.
In contrast, the clue giver in Mysterium is simply trying to maximize the amount of information conveyed to the other players and working around the limited channel they have available to them.
I’ve played a couple of games of mysterium yesterday and it’s very good, all the spooky feeling of Dixit but with actual good games mechanic behind.
At my (French thing which is not exactly a) college we used to play codename but with Dixit’s card instead, it was a lot of fun.
We typically play that this is not allowed, unless you’re targeting your reference at the player in last place.