Knucklebones likely rolled into the dice that still decide games
A die is a marked throwable that lands on one face to yield chance values—classically a cube pipped 1 through 6. Origins likely track fortune-telling with animal tali (knucklebones); Indian Vedas and the Mahabharata already mention dice play. Romans avidly diced as aleam ludere despite bans, using tali and tesserae.
Fair cubes aim for equal odds on each face. Role-playing and board games multiply sides beyond six. Greek knucklebones mixed skill tossing with numbered sides; Plains Indigenous peoples are thought to have used related randomizers long ago.
The word die descends through Old French dé from Latin datum, something given or played. Gamblers still sometimes call the faces ace, deuce, trey, cater, cinque and sice, and two ones are snake eyes, a term traced to 1919, while two sixes are boxcars. Dice are thrown from the hand or from a cup, tray or tower, and the throw breaks the die's symmetry enough to give an effectively random result. In China, dice gave rise to dominoes and, around the Tang dynasty, to playing cards, and in Japan they drove the game sugoroku.
A standard cube is usually 1.6 cm across, with opposite faces summing to seven; whether the one, two and three run clockwise or counterclockwise makes a die left- or right-handed. Asian dice set their pips nearer the centre and paint the one and four red. Casino precision dice are sawn from extruded cellulose acetate with edges accurate to about five thousandths of a millimetre and drilled pips filled with paint of matching density, while cheaper game dice are injection-moulded, often from PMMA, dipped in paint and tumbled until only the recessed pips stay coloured. Precision backgammon dice have flush pips and rounded edges to protect the board.
Source: Dice
