How to play 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, even a hummed tune — inspired by one of their cards, and everyone else secretly slips in a decoy card that could plausibly match it. All the cards are shuffled together and revealed, and the table votes on which one was the storyteller's.

The central tension is beautifully simple: a clue that is too obvious or too obscure scores the storyteller nothing, so you must aim for some-but-not-all correct guesses. Meanwhile, the other players earn points both for finding the right card and for every vote their own decoy steals.

Never played a judging game like this? There are no wrong answers and nothing to memorize — each round you either invent one clue or pick one card and cast one vote. The skill is entirely social: reading how your friends think, and offering clues pitched exactly halfway between poetry and description.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 84 image cards — the heart of the game: oversized, surreal illustrations with no text and no fixed meaning. Every card is deliberately ambiguous so it can support many different clues — that ambiguity is what makes decoys possible.
• 1 scoring board (built into the box insert) — a winding point track. Open the box and it's already on the table; scores are marked by moving rabbits along it.
• 6 wooden rabbits (the "rabbeeples") — one per player, your pawn on the scoring track.
• 36 voting tokens (6 colors, numbered 1–6) — each player takes the set of their color. After the cards are revealed in a numbered row, you vote by placing the token matching the position of the card you think is the storyteller's, face down — so all votes land simultaneously and nobody can follow the crowd.

Every round has the same five steps, and everyone is involved in all of them:

1. The storyteller gives a clue. Look at your 6 images, secretly pick one, and say a clue inspired by it — a single word, a sentence, a movie title, a proverb, a sound, even a mime or a song in the classic variants. Place the card face down without showing it. The clue is the whole game: too literal and everyone finds it, too abstract and no one does — both score you zero.
2. Everyone else picks a decoy. Each other player chooses the card from their own hand that best matches the clue and passes it face down to the storyteller. A good decoy is an attack — every vote it fools someone into is a point for you.
3. Reveal. The storyteller shuffles their card with all the decoys and lays them face up in a row: leftmost card is 1, then 2, and so on — one card per player.
4. Vote. Everyone except the storyteller secretly places the voting token matching the card they believe is the storyteller's, face down, then all votes flip at once. You may never vote for your own card.
5. Score and reset. Move the rabbits (see How to win), everyone draws back up to 6 cards, and the player to the storyteller's left becomes the next storyteller.

A round, played out. Ana is the storyteller and murmurs "colder than it looks." Beto, Carla, and Diego each hand her a card; she shuffles and reveals four images. Beto votes 2 — Ana's actual card, an iceberg-blue ballroom. Carla and Diego both vote 3, Beto's card, a smiling snowman with hollow eyes. Score it: Ana and Beto take 3 points each for the found card, and Beto's decoy stole two votes for 2 bonus points — Beto banks 5 and grins. Carla and Diego take nothing, and Ana quietly notes that her clues need one more layer of fog.

Scoring each round hinges on how well the storyteller split the table:

• If every voter found the storyteller's card, or no one did, the storyteller scores 0 and every other player scores 2. This is the rule that forbids lazy clues in both directions.
• Otherwise — some found it, some didn't — the storyteller scores 3, and so does each player who voted correctly.
• On top of that, every non-storyteller scores 1 bonus point per vote their own decoy received.

The game ends when the last card of the draw pile is drawn; whoever's rabbit is furthest along the track wins. (Newer editions of Dixit instead play to 30 points — agree on your finish line before you start.)

Strategically: as storyteller, aim your clue at one or two specific people — a shared memory or an in-joke is the perfect thickness of fog. As a guesser, don't neglect the decoy: over a full game, well-aimed decoys quietly score as much as correct guesses, and they score even on rounds when you read the storyteller wrong.