Diximus is a game of storytelling for four or more people that can be played with just pens and paper. In it, players write short narratives based on a prompt, and then compete to guess who authored the stories.
It is a generalization of the 2010 Spiel des Jahres Winning game Dixit. I’m making it up as I write this.
The Rules
The rules of Diximus are very simple.
- Each round, one player is the storyteller. This position rotates clockwise or whatever.
- The storyteller provides a prompt to the group. It can be a sentence, a song, even a picture.
- All players, including the storyteller, write a story (probably a very short story–could just be a sentence), and give the stories to the storyteller without revealing them to any other players.
- The storyteller shuffles the stories, including his/her own, into a random order and reads them aloud.
- Each player who is not the storyteller then votes on which story they think was authored by the storyteller. These votes need to be done simultaneously, so each player should write down their vote privately on paper before they are revealed.
- Score as follows:
- If all the players correctly guess which story was authored by the storyteller, the storyteller gets 0 points and the other players each get 2 points.
- If none of the players guess correctly, then the same thing: the storyteller gets 0 points and the other players each get 2 points.
- If at least one but not all players guess the storyteller’s story correctly, then the storyteller and the correct guessers each get 3 points and the other players get 0 points.
Example Play
Nikolai, Anna, Ivan, and Mikhail are playing. Nikolai is the storyteller.
Nikolai presents the prompt: A tragic day at the circus.
Now each player (including Nikolai) writes a story.
Anna, for example, knows that Nikolai is deathly afraid of clowns. So she writes the following in order to ‘pretend to be’ Nikolai: The clowns were set loose and ate all the children alive. She then passes this story on a slip of paper to Nikolai.
Nikolai collects the stories, shuffles them, and reads them aloud. They are:
- He dropped the cotton candy.
- Once long ago there was an age when elephants ran the circuses. Everything was blissful because elephants are gentle creatures. Then one day an evil ringmaster came and enslaved the elephants. It took generations of selective breeding to make circus elephants as docile as they are now. Some of them don’t even know the history of their own slavery.
- The clowns were set loose and ate all the children alive.
- I am not afraid of clowns.
Everyone knows that Mikhail wrote story (2) because he’s long-winded and fanciful. He’s not very good at the game but at least he had fun this round. He falls for Anna’s trap and writes (3) down on a piece of paper.
Anna has a hard time guessing whether Nikolai wrote (1) or (4). It comes down to this: is Nikolai the sort of person who would try to write an unremarkable story in order to try to “blend in” with the other stories, or is he the sort of person to deliberately throw a meta-gaming move of denying his own clown fear in order to confuse any clown references that might show up.
Or, she thinks again, is Ivan the sort of smart ass who would drop a confusing reference to Nikolai’s clown fear in the first person in order to try to phase Anna, or is he just not trying that hard and wrote something about cotton candy instead. Wait, does Ivan even know about Nikolai’s clown fear?
She decides that Ivan may just be that crafty and so writes down her vote that the storyteller wrote (1).
She’s wrong though. That’s just paranoid of her. In fact, Ivan wrote (1). He is trying to figure out whether Nikolai wrote (3) or (4). He didn’t know that Nikolai is afraid of clowns before, but he does now. (Diximus is a game where you can learn interesting things about your friends.)
Ivan thinks that breaking the fourth wall in an offbeat way is just the kind of stunt Nikolai would pull as a kind of teachable moment about the crazy things you can do in Diximus, and votes (4).
Now all the votes are revealed. Nikolai and Ivan both get 3 points; Anna and Mikhail get 0 points. Nikolai says that he really, really isn’t afraid of clowns, that’s just a rumor someone started years ago, and he just wanted to take the opportunity to set the record straight. Anna doesn’t believe him at all.
Mikhail is the storyteller in the next round. All the players prepare to mimic Mikhail’s style and write paragraph long fantasies using words they know he likes. He begins his prompt: General Ulysses S. Grant was drinking in his tent when the not-yet-famous photographer Matthew Brady arrived on his hungry triceratops…
Relationship to Dixit
Dixit has a similar voting and scoring structure but rather than having players write down anything they want, their options are constrained by cards in their hand. The cards have surreal and/or fairy tale images on them.
This has the benefit of making it a more visually interesting and probably less intimidating game. But it does mean that you have to buy the cards and it puts limitations on the gameplay.
Diximus is an attempt to unlock as much creative and strategic potential as possible from the central game mechanic. It is also designed to have a lower barrier to entry because all you need to play are pens, paper, and the memory of a few rules.
To be continued…
As far as I know, nobody has ever played this game before. So that’s about all that can be said about it for now. But if anyone wants to play it, I’d be eager to give it a try. It’s a game that naturally lends itself to Play By Email, so we could get a game going wherever you are.





