Does Dixit need any modifications to play with 7, 8, 9, and 10 players?

Question

I've enjoyed Dixit greatly with groups of 5 and 6, and I'm curious if it needs any rule variations to extend it further. I was thinking perhaps requiring at least 2 players to guess the correct card instead of just 1 when playing with 8 or more people, because otherwise the storyteller can tell a rather unspecific story and still rely on 1 person getting it by guessing.

Does Dixit need any adjustments to play with more than 6 players? If so, which rules would you recommend adding and at what number of players? How would the overall game change when more people were added?

Do not worry about running out of cards to use and having to reshuffle to keep the game going. If you're curious, I actually use Magic: The Gathering cards to play the game, so we have a deck of around 250 cards, which is more than enough.

Answer 1

Dixit Odyssey has rules for 7+ players. The suggested scoring system for 7+ players:

• Each player has two vote tokens, not just one. They can split their guess between two cards if they want.
• If all players correctly identify the storyteller's card, or none do, everyone except the storyteller receives two points each.
• Otherwise, the storyteller receives three points and so does anyone else who correctly identifies the storyteller's card. If they only used one of their two votes, they receive a bonus point.
• For each other card, the person who played it gets a bonus point (to a maximum of three) for each player who voted for it.

The game ends when the first player reaches 30 points. Calculate the rest of the scoring for the round (in case someone overtakes), and then the winner of the game is the person with the highest number of points.

Answer 2

Does Dixit need any modifications for more players? You need some way for each of those players to secretly bid on what card they think is correct (numbered playing cards could work). As for the number of players affecting how likely it is for a random guess to give them points, let's do some math and find out.

Let's assume in all these examples that the storyteller's card is card #1. Player2 plays card 2, Player3 plays card 3, etc.. Let's ignore 3-player alternate rules variant for playing 2 cards. Player's also cannot vote for their own cards (from the rules).

3-Player

1) 25% Player2 guesses #1 Player3 guesses #1, Storyteller gets 0 points, other players get 2.

2) 25% Player2 guesses #1 Player3 guesses #2, Storyteller gets 3 points, Player2 gets 4 (+1 from Player3's wrong guess).

3) 25% Player2 guesses #3 Player3 guesses #2, Storyteller gets 0 points, other players get 3.

4) 25% Player2 guesses #3 Player3 guesses #1, Storyteller gets 3 points, Player3 gets 4 (+1 from Player2's wrong guess).

This works out to an average score of the following:

3-Player Storyteller 1.50 points, Non-Storyteller 2.25 points.

Not to bother you with the math for the calculations, did this in a spreadsheet. (x points/y outcomes).

4-Player Storyteller 2.000 points (54/27), Non-Storyteller 1.630 points (44/27).

5-Player Storyteller 2.039 points (522/256), Non-Storyteller 1.496 points (383/256).

6-Player Storyteller 2.016 points (6300/3125), Non-Storyteller 1.400 points (4374/3125).

My guess as to the average results for 7, 8, 9, and 10 players is that the Storyteller's average points will approach 2 as the number of players reaches infinity, and the Non-Storyteller's average points will approach 1 as the number of players reaches infinity.

A way to curb the Storyteller from just giving bogus clues, would be to give out bonus points depending upon the number of players. In a 6-player game, approximately 40% (1280/3125) of the time only a single player will get the answer right. If you give out 5 (number of guessers) or 6 (number of players) bonus points to the single guesser that got the answer right, this will add an additional 2.05 or 2.46 point on average to the Non-Storyteller players. This should discourage giving bad clues, since employing a bad clue strategy will on average put you 2 to 2 1/2 points behind. This should scale well, because as the number of players increase, the number of bonus points increases. If you do need to extend this further (not sure you need to, but I haven't worked out the odds of only exactly one person getting it right for 7, 8, ... players), you could give out bonus points rounded down for the total number of players that got it right. (example, 10-Player game: if one person gets it right +10 points, if two people get it right +5 points each, if 3 people get it right +3 points each, ...)

Answer 3

As I explained in my answer to a question about balancing Dixit, the formula is to use r × n² + n × 5 cards for n players playing r rounds. That way, every player gets the same number of turns of being the story tellers.

So for 7 players, you need 35 cards + 49 for each round, for 8 players 40 + 64 for each round, for 9 players 45 + 81 for each round, and for 10 players 50 + 100 for each round.

Answer 4

I use these house rules when playing with more than 6 and they have worked out for me really well.

If only 1 person guesses the right card, it is counted as if no one guessed the right card. If only 1 person guesses the wrong card, it is counted like everyone guessed the right card.

This seems to take a lot of chaos of the game. One person not paying attention can't throw the round on an obvious clue. One person guessing randomly, and i think the odds of guessing go up, can't throw the game either.

After that we often play with simplified scoring. 3 points for all hits. 3 points for all misses. No one can earn more than 5 points in a round.