For 3-8 Players
Dixit is a game in which you take turns becoming a storyteller
and give questions with appropriate difficulty.
<Components>
- One game board inside the box (scoring track)
- 84 cards
- 36 voting tokens in 6 different colours numbered from 1 to 6
- 6 wooden rabbits (rabbeeples!)
<Setup>
Each player chooses one rabbit
and place it on the space 0 of the scoring track.
Shuffle the 84 images and give 6 of them to each player.
Make a draw pile with the remaining cards.
- With 4 players, each one takes 4 voting tokens (from 1 to 4).
- With 5 players, each one takes 5 voting tokens (from 1 to 5).
- With 6 players, each one takes 6 voting tokens (from 1 to 6).
Note: Do not show your hand of cards to anyone.
<Game Play>
The storyteller
One player is the storyteller for the turn.
He looks at the 6 images in his hand.
From one of these,
he makes up a sentence and says it out loud
(without showing the card to the other players).
The sentence can take different forms:
it can be made of one word or more,
it can even be a sound.
The sentence can be either invented
or be inspired from an existing work of art
(poetry or song sample, movie title, proverb, etc).
Who is the storyteller for the first turn?
The first player to describe one of their cards
aloud will be the storyteller for the first turn.
Choosing a card for the storyteller
The other players select amongst their 6 images the one
that best matches the sentence made up by the storyteller.
Then, each of them gives their selected card to the storyteller,
without showing it to the others.
The storyteller shuffles his card with all the received cards.
He then randomly places them face up on the table.
The card on the left will be number 1,
the one next to it will be number 2, and so on…
Finding the storyteller’s image: the vote
The goal of the other players is to find
which image is from the storyteller amongst the displayed ones.
Each player secretly votes for the card
that he believes belongs to the storyteller
(who doesn’t vote).
To do so, he places face down in front of him the voting token
corresponding to the image he voted for.
Once everybody has voted,
all the voting tokens are revealed
and placed on their corresponding images.
Note: You’re not allowed to vote for your own image.
Scoring
- If all players have found the storyteller’s image,
or if none have found it,
then the storyteller doesn’t score any points
and everyone else scores 2 points.
- In any other case, the storyteller scores 3 points
and so do the players who found his image.
- Each player, except the storyteller,
scores one point for each vote that was placed on their image.
The players move their rabbits along the scoring track
by the same number of spaces as points scored.
End of turn
Each player draws a new card to bring their hand up to 6 once more.
The storyteller for the new turn is the player
to the left of the current one
(and we keep going clockwise for the following turns).
<Game End>
The game ends when the last card
from the pack has been drawn.
The player who’s the furthest
on the scoring track is the winner..
<Examples>
5 players are around the table: Julien, Mathilde, Nicolas, Léa and Tom.
Julien is the first player to find a sentence inspired
by an image from his hand.
So, he will start the first turn as the storyteller.
The sentence he says to everyone is: « Where is happiness? »,
referring to the French movie « Happiness is in the field ».
After listening to the sentence,
the other players have to choose from their hand an image
that will best match the sentence provided by Julien.
Léa has those 6 cards in hand:
Amongst those 6 images,
she chooses the 3rd one which is,
for her, the closest to Julien’s sentence « Where is happiness? ».
She gives this card to him.
Mathilde, Nicolas and Tom also choose one of their cards
and give them to Julien, the storyteller for this turn.
Julien shuffles his card with the ones he received
from the other players and places them in the middle of the table.
Each player (except the storyteller) is going to vote
for the one they think is Julien’s card.
Once everyone has selected their voting token, they reveal them.
Only Léa has found Julien’s card (number 4).
So she and Julien score 3 points each.
2 players have voted for Léa’s card (number 1)
and so she scores 2 additional points.
Tom scores 1 point as one person has voted for his card (number 3).
At the end of this turn,
Léa scores a total of 5 points, Julien 3 points and Tom 1 point;
Mathilde and Nicolas don’t score any point
as they couldn’t find Julien’s card,
and no one has voted for their cards.
For the next turn,
Tom will be the storyteller
as he’s seated to the left of Julien.
<Game Tips>
If the sentence given by the storyteller describes the image too precisely,
all the players will easily find it
and so he won’t score any points.
On the other hand,
if his sentence has very little to do with the image,
it’s quite likely that nobody will vote for him,
and again he will score no points.
So the challenge for the storyteller is to find a sentence
that is neither too descriptive,
nor too abstract,
so that there is a chance that only some players find it,
but not all.
At the beginning,
this can be fairly hard to achieve,
but you’ll see that the inspiration comes more easily after a few turns.
<Variants>
3 players:
each player has 7 cards,
instead of 6. Every player except the storyteller gives 2 cards, instead of one.
So we end up with 5 displayed cards to choose from.
Scoring:
When only one player has found the storyteller’s card,
they both score 4 points, instead of 3.
Mimes or songs:
in this variant, the storyteller has the possibility
to either sing a song or some music that could be somehow related to the card,
or even mime it.
The rest of the game stays the same.
Finally, nothing prevents you
from mixing the different variants together
or creating some of your own!
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