How to play Dixit

3–6 players (up to 8 with expansion) Very light — storytelling and social deduction

What is Dixit?

Dixit is a storytelling card game by Jean-Louis Roubira in which players hold hands of large, dreamlike illustration cards and take turns acting as the storyteller. Each round the storyteller invents a clue — a word, a phrase, a sound, anything — inspired by one of their cards, and everyone else tries to slip in a decoy that could plausibly match it.

The central tension is beautifully simple: a clue that is too obvious or too obscure scores nothing, so the storyteller must aim for some-but-not-all correct guesses. Meanwhile, the other players race to craft convincing decoys and guess shrewdly, earning points both for finding the right card and for votes their own decoy attracts.

Setup

Set up the scoring board. Unfold the scoring board and place each player’s rabbit token on space 0.
Deal cards. Shuffle the full deck of illustrated cards and deal 6 cards to each player. Place the remaining deck face-down as a draw pile.
Distribute voting tokens. Give each player a set of numbered voting tokens. In each round, cards are laid out in positions 1 through N (where N = the number of players); each player uses only the tokens matching those position numbers. The numbers correspond to positions in that row — you use them to secretly point to the card you believe is the storyteller’s.
Choose a starting storyteller. The player who most recently told a story goes first; the storyteller role passes clockwise each round.

How to play

Dixit is played over a series of rounds, each with the same five steps:

The storyteller gives a clue. Secretly choose one card from your hand. Say a clue — a word, phrase, sound, or sentence — inspired by it, then place the card face-down in the middle of the table.
Other players choose a decoy. Everyone else picks the card from their own hand that best matches the clue and passes it face-down to the storyteller.
All cards are revealed. The storyteller shuffles all submitted cards together with their own and lays them face-up in a numbered row — there will be exactly one card per player (the storyteller's plus one decoy from each other player).
Players vote. Everyone except the storyteller secretly chooses the number of the card they believe is the storyteller's. You may not vote for the card you submitted yourself.
Scoring. Reveal the votes, move rabbit tokens, and pass the storyteller role clockwise. Everyone draws back up to a full hand.

How to win

Scoring each round:

If every voter found the storyteller's card, or no one did, the storyteller scores 0 and every other player scores 2.
Otherwise the storyteller and each player who voted correctly each score 3.
Every non-storyteller scores 1 bonus point for each vote their decoy card received from other players.

The game ends immediately when any player reaches space 30 on the scoring track, or when the draw deck runs out. The player with the highest score wins.

Strategically: as the storyteller, resist clues that are too straightforward or too cryptic — you need at least one player to find your card, but not all of them. As a guesser, a well-chosen decoy that echoes the clue can quietly earn you as many points as guessing correctly.