Diximus

The Premise 

Diximus is a Dixit varient, which takes Dixit’s truncated story telling mechanic and expands on it. A standard Dixit game set is required for play. The structure of game play is slightly changed, but allows for further interpretation of the abstract art provided on Dixit playing cards.

The Brainstorm

Diximus originally started out as a much more complicated game played with Story War cards. Players were encouraged to ask leading questions of the storyteller to nudge the story into a direction for which they could play a concluding card. This failed miserably as the leading questions often made it quite obvious which cards where played by which players. Also the definite nature of the Story War cards meant fewer possible meanings or endings could be.

Game Play

Game set up remains almost the same. Instead of a six card hand each player maintains a 7 card hand.

Players take turns as the story teller. The story telling component differs greatly from that of Dixit’s. On the storytellers turn instead of saying a single sentence to describe a single card, the story teller crafts a story with three cards from their hand. The story teller than leaves their story unfinished playing a final fourth card face down. The story teller should leave a slight suggestion has to how their story ends. You can view a video of this step here.

Every other player then also attempts to end the story with a card from their own hand, placing it facedown. Players should choose cards that the story teller also could have chosen based on the story tellers suggested ending. You can view a video of this step here.

From here scoring happens the same way as in Dixit. Three scoring scenarios are possible.

1. If all players select the storyteller’s card then all players but the story teller receives two points.
2. If no player selects the storyteller’s card then all players receive two points plus a point for each player that chose their card.
3. If at least one player selects the storyteller’s card then the story teller and each player that selected the storyteller’s card gets three points. Players receive one extra point for each player that mistakenly chose their card.

All cards that have been seen are discarded.

Players draw their hands back up to seven cards.

Storytelling responsibility then shifts to the left, and a new round begins.

Play repeats until a player has earned thirty points. Cards from discard pile are shuffled and reused if needed.

Player Feedback

Players seemed to enjoy the game. All players were told about regular Dixit before game play, but few had played it previously. All players stated that they enjoyed this variation more than their understanding of Dixit. One player, who plays Dixit with family, said she was considering playing this variant instead the next time she played.

I developed this Dixit variant with Tim Livingston. You can read his thoughts here.