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Some roll-and-writes shower you with bonuses, combos, special powers and enough chain reactions to make you forget which box you originally crossed. Sixto goes in a very different direction. It gives one to six players six coloured dice, a sheet full of numbers and a pencil. That is basically your toolbox.
But having only a few rules doesn’t mean the next cross is always obvious. In Sixto, every cross pushes you farther along a row while also affecting the column it sits in. Suddenly, a number that looks useful horizontally can be rather awkward vertically. Add shared dice, different player sheets and colours that can disappear before you are ready, and this small roll-and-write starts asking some surprisingly uncomfortable questions. Most importantly: just because you can cross off a number, should you?
👥 1-6 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designers: Steffen Benndorf & Florian Benndorf
🎨 Artwork: Christian Opperer
🏢 Publisher: KENDi (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each player gets a score sheet with six rows in purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. There is a die matching each colour, and the rows contain different sequences of numbers. There are twelve different sheet layouts in total, and players should use different layouts from one another.
Crossing off numbers always works from left to right within a row. If you use a die, you find that number somewhere to the right of your current position in the matching coloured row and cross it off. You can skip as many spaces as you like to reach a number, but anything you skip can’t be used later. Near the end of every row is a target area. Before you’re allowed to cross a number there, you need to have already crossed at least four spaces in that row.
The active player rolls all six dice. If they don’t like the result, they can reroll, but there’s a catch: all six dice have to be rerolled. You can’t put aside the useful ones and try your luck again with the rest. After that second roll, the result is final.
Everyone then uses that same set of dice on their own sheet. Each die can be used once by each player, so you could potentially cross one number in every coloured row. You don’t have to, though. If a die would force you farther along a row than you’d like, you can simply leave it unused. Once everyone has finished making their choices, the dice pass clockwise and the next player becomes active.
Once someone is going to cross their second box in the target area of a row, they have to announce this first. This gives everyone else one final opportunity to use that colour during the current turn, following the normal crossing rules. Afterwards, that colour is closed for everybody and its die is removed from the game.
Scoring looks at both rows and columns. The more crosses you have in one, the more points it scores according to the table printed on the sheet. Exactly one cross is bad news, giving you -5 points, while an empty column scores nothing. Columns inside the target areas aren’t scored. The game ends after the turn in which at least the third die is removed, or if a player has crossed the last possible box in every row and can’t cross anything else. Highest score wins, with the total number of crossed spaces breaking a tie. Solo play follows the same basic rules, but ends once at least two dice aren’t used for crossing off numbers.
Artwork & Components
There’s no theme hiding behind Sixto’s numbers. Nobody is building a city, exploring a cave or pretending that crossing out a red 5 represents harvesting tomatoes. It’s an abstract dice game, and visually it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
The six colours dominate everything. Purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red run across the box and continue onto the sheets and dice. The sheets are quite busy when you first look at them, but the large numbers and clear separation between the rows make them easy enough to read once you’re playing.
The twelve sheet layouts are probably the most interesting part of the production for us. They’re different arrangements of the same basic structure, so everyone can sit around the table looking at a slightly different collection of numbers. It isn’t visually exciting, but seeing those different layouts immediately makes it clear that another player’s sheet isn’t going to behave exactly like yours.
Beyond the sheets, there isn’t much in the box: pencils, six coloured dice and, well, that’s basically it. The graphics are by Christian Opperer, with everything mainly designed to make the numbers and colours easy to distinguish. I don’t think Sixto needed much more than that. By the end of a game, our increasingly chaotic pencil marks provide most of the decoration anyway.
Our Experience
Our first games went more or less how you’d expect when giving us six usable dice and telling us we weren’t required to use all of them. We used too many of them. We already knew that racing through every row probably wasn’t the best idea, but there’s still something strangely difficult about leaving a perfectly usable die sitting there. Crossing another number feels like progress, so we crossed. Then scoring arrived and several lonely marks in our columns turned into -5 points. Apparently enthusiasm isn’t a scoring category. What changed over the next few games wasn’t so much our understanding of whether to move forward, but how quickly we thought each individual row could afford to move.
By our next few games, unused dice were becoming a much more common sight. Instead of immediately checking which numbers we could cross, we started looking at what we would leave behind by doing so. Sometimes jumping several spaces was completely fine because the cross landed exactly where we wanted it. At other times, we’d ignore a number sitting only one or two spaces away because using it would leave us with something awkward elsewhere. I found that slightly uncomfortable at first. There’s something about a roll-and-write that makes me want to write. Sitting there doing nothing with a perfectly valid orange 3 takes some getting used to. Eventually, though, leaving dice unused stopped feeling like we’d wasted a turn.
We also started looking up from our own sheets more often. In one of our earlier games, I was happily taking my time with a colour because there were several numbers I still wanted. Someone else was already much farther along. When the announcement came that the row was about to close, my lovely little plan suddenly had one final chance to become useful. It didn’t. After that, we paid much more attention to who was approaching the end of a colour. The same happened with rerolls. At first we mostly asked whether the current result was good enough for us. Later there were definitely moments where the conversation became, “I’m not giving you that roll again.” Of course, rerolling all six dice can just as easily replace your opponent’s excellent result with an even better one. We tested that too.
We’d also look at exactly the same six dice and have completely different reactions. One person would be delighted while someone else looked personally offended. With two or three players, it was possible to keep an eye on which colours others were pushing and occasionally let that influence a reroll. With more players, we stopped trying to inspect every sheet before making a decision. There was simply too much information, and colours could disappear because of somebody we hadn’t been watching closely. Our games with more players therefore became less predictable, while at two and three we had a better idea of what everybody was trying to do.
Towards the end, we usually had more things we wanted to fix than turns left to fix them. Early on, there are still plenty of possibilities and it’s easy to imagine everything working out nicely. Later, a column needs another cross, two colours are getting close to closing, and another row still has several numbers you’d really rather not skip. At that point we stopped trying to fix everything and started deciding which problems were actually worth fixing. Some rows had to be abandoned earlier than we’d planned, and occasionally accepting a mediocre result was better than waiting for something that probably wasn’t coming.
Our Thoughts
Sixto will inevitably remind people of Qwixx, and I don’t think there’s much point pretending otherwise. Steffen Benndorf designed Qwixx as well, and the coloured dice, shared results and permanent left-to-right progress are familiar. If you’ve played Qwixx, you’ll recognise where some of Sixto’s ideas are coming from. Compared with many newer roll-and-writes full of bonuses, resources, special actions and combo chains, Sixto is actually quite restrained. If you’ve played plenty of games in the genre, I don’t think you’ll look at it and wonder how nobody came up with anything like it before.
What matters more to us is whether the changes are enough to make us want to play Sixto instead of simply reaching for Qwixx again, and I think they are. Scoring both rows and columns is the main reason we’d choose Sixto, while the different sheets mean we’re not all looking for exactly the same numbers from every roll. I wouldn’t call it highly interactive, because most of your attention is still on your own sheet, but we definitely wouldn’t ignore what everyone else is doing. Their progress can shorten your plans, and seeing what works well for their sheets can make you think twice about a reroll.
There are limitations, and the biggest one for me is how little control you have over the dice themselves. You get one reroll, and that reroll replaces everything. That’s it. Sometimes a colour simply refuses to give you the numbers you want before somebody closes it. I don’t mind some luck in a roughly fifteen-minute dice game, but players used to roll-and-writes where results can be modified, combined or spent as resources may find Sixto restrictive. I’m also a little less sure about how long the twelve different sheets will keep things feeling different. They change where the problems appear, but they don’t fundamentally change what you’re trying to do. After several games, we felt we’d understood most of the general ideas we needed. A new sheet still gives us a different puzzle, but not a completely different way of approaching it.
I also think player count matters more than I initially expected. Sixto works across its range, but for us two or three players is probably the sweet spot. We can follow the other sheets without turning every roll into an inspection round, so the decision to keep or reroll a result feels more informed. With a larger group, there’s more happening and colours can close less predictably. We preferred having a better idea of what was happening around us, so two or three would be my choice.
Despite those reservations, we’ve ended up liking Sixto more than our first game suggested we would. It isn’t because the game suddenly revealed another layer of rules. Quite the opposite. We got better at recognising when not to do something, and that made the same six dice more interesting to us. A few weeks between games isn’t going to leave us reaching for the rulebook, and getting someone new started mostly comes down to explaining when they can cross a number and why they probably shouldn’t cross every number they can. I wouldn’t choose Sixto when I’m in the mood for a more involved roll-and-write, and someone looking for long combo chains or lots of control over the dice should probably look elsewhere. But if you already enjoy Qwixx-style number games, I think the column scoring, different sheets and disappearing colours give Sixto enough reason to come out of the box as well.
It’s still a straightforward dice game, and I don’t expect every play to feel completely different from the last. But that’s also why I can see us returning to it. We don’t need to remember a collection of special rules or relearn how everything connects. We can hand out the sheets, roll six dice and get going, while still having enough to think about once those crosses start spreading across the page. For us, that’s a pretty good place for a game like Sixto to be. And now that we’ve mostly learned to stop crossing every number just because we can, our scores aren’t quite as embarrassing either.
📝 We received a copy of Sixto from KENDi.
