Qwixx Rules

Everyone plays from the same dice rolls in Qwixx, but everyone marks a completely private scorecard — there's no board, no pieces, and no direct way to block an opponent, which makes it one of the fastest-setting-up dice games covered on this site despite genuinely rewarding careful decision-making every single roll.

Setup

Each player gets an identical scorecard with four colored rows (red, yellow, green, blue), each row listing numbers in a fixed sequence — red and yellow count up from 2 to 12, green and blue count down from 12 to 2. Six dice are used: two white (numberless in color, used together) and one die in each of the four row colors.

Taking a Turn

The active player rolls all six dice. First, any player at the table — not just the active player — may optionally cross off a number equal to the sum of the two white dice, in any single row of their choosing. Then, only the active player gets a second optional action: adding one colored die to a white die and crossing off that sum in the matching colored row. If the active player can't or doesn't want to mark anything from either combination, they must instead take a penalty mark on their own scorecard.

The Left-to-Right Rule

Within each row, numbers must be crossed off in strict left-to-right order — you can't cross off a 6 in a row if a 4 to its left is still unmarked, even if the dice would otherwise allow it. This single rule is what actually creates the game's core tension: skipping a low number early to wait for a more valuable high number later can permanently lock you out of ever marking that low number at all, since you can never go back for it once a later number in the same row has been crossed.

Locking a Row and Ending It

Once a player has crossed off at least five numbers in a single row, they may also cross off that row's final locking box, closing the entire row permanently for every player — no one, including the player who locked it, can mark anything in that row again for the rest of the game. The game ends the moment either two full rows have been locked by anyone at the table, or any single player accumulates four penalty marks.

Scoring

Each row scores using a fixed cumulative table — the more numbers you've crossed off in a single row, the more each additional mark is worth compared to the last, so a row with eight marks scores far more than double a row with four. Each penalty mark subtracts a flat 5 points. Row scores plus any penalty deductions combine into a single final total, highest score wins.

Why Everyone Gets the White-Dice Option

Letting every player at the table act on the white-dice sum, not just whoever rolled, is what keeps Qwixx moving quickly with any number of players — nobody sits through a long wait doing nothing on someone else's turn, since there's always at least one shared decision available every single roll regardless of whose turn it technically is. This also means the active player carries slightly more overall opportunity per turn (two possible marks instead of one), which is balanced out simply by turns rotating evenly around the table.

Where Qwixx Came From

Qwixx was designed by Steffen Benndorf, a German dice and card game designer, and published in 2012. It was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres jury prize the following year, an honor reserved for games judged to show particular design quality even when they don't win the main award, and it became one of the more commercially successful "roll and write" style games — a genre defined exactly by Qwixx's format of shared dice rolls marked privately onto individual scorecards rather than moved on a shared board.

The Arguments This Game Actually Produces

A scoring deep-dive breaks down the full cumulative point table by row length, and a printable scorecard covers a table that's run out of the pad that came in the box.

The most common dispute is whether a player can choose to skip an available white-dice mark specifically to deny a rival information about their strategy, which is entirely legal — marking is always optional, for both the shared white-dice action and the active player's colored-die action. A second common argument is exactly when penalty marks are forced: a player is only required to take one if they genuinely have no legal, useful mark available from either combination that turn, not simply because they'd prefer to skip a technically valid option.

Questions People Still Ask Mid-Game

Can you decline to mark the white-dice sum even if it's a valid, useful number? Yes — every marking opportunity in Qwixx, including the shared white-dice sum, is entirely optional, never mandatory unless it's the only way to avoid a penalty mark that turn.

Does locking a row end the game immediately, or only when a second row locks? Locking a single row doesn't end the game by itself — the game only ends once a second row (by anyone) is locked, or any player reaches four penalty marks, whichever happens first.

Can more than one player lock the same row? No — a row can only be locked once total, by whichever player gets there first; every other player's version of that same-colored row simply closes for everyone the instant it's locked.