Chance and caution
Dice games are games of chance, and casino dice games carry a built-in house edge. No strategy, system or way of throwing changes the odds in the player’s favor over time, most players lose money in the long run, and nobody should gamble money they cannot afford to lose. A local support service can help anyone struggling with gambling.
Why dice history is hard to pin down
Dice are among the oldest gaming objects, but their history is full of gaps. Dice are small, they were made from bone, ivory, wood, stone and clay, and archaeologists cannot always tell whether a given object was used for gambling, for board games, for religious or divination purposes, or simply for fun. That is why the sections below avoid exact dates and sweeping claims.
Knucklebones and early finds
The ancestor of the die is often said to be the knucklebone, or astragalus, the ankle bone of an animal such as a sheep. It has an irregular shape and lands on one of four main sides when tossed, which gave early players a simple random device. Knucklebones have been found at many ancient sites, and writers in the ancient Mediterranean describe games using them.
Cubic dice with numbered or dotted faces also appear in ancient finds. Examples from Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley region, Egypt and the Mediterranean world are commonly cited, with dates that stretch back several thousand years. Dice from different areas vary in size, shape and numbering. Some ancient dice had pairs of opposite faces that did not add up to seven, a convention that seems to have become standard later. Many early dice also look somewhat imperfect, which raises a general point that imbalance can slightly affect results, though not in ways that can be summarized without examining a particular object.
Dice were also part of board games, where they moved pieces along tracks. This suggests that dice were not only for gambling from the start; wagering on such games was a common addition.
Greece and Rome
Greek and Roman writers refer to dice games and to gambling on them. Roman sources mention games with two or three dice and describe laws that restricted gambling to certain festivals or banned it outside private settings. Accounts of emperors and ordinary citizens playing for stakes appear in surviving literature, although the details are often anecdotal.
A recurring feature in these sources is concern about dice cheating. Loaded dice, meaning dice weighted to land on certain faces, have been found at various ancient sites. The long history of cheating is one reason fair equipment and surveillance later became important, as covered under table integrity.
Medieval Europe and hazard
In medieval Europe, dice gambling was widespread, and it was often condemned by church and civil authorities, who periodically banned it. One game from this period, called hazard, is frequently mentioned in later English and French writings. Its rules varied over time and are described differently in different sources, but it involved a player naming a main number, throwing two dice, and winning or losing according to what came up.
It is also from this period that people began to study dice outcomes systematically. Counting how many ways dice can land is a basic exercise, and tables of the possible results for two dice later fed into early probability work. The distribution is summarized under two-dice outcomes.
The road to craps
Craps is commonly described as a descendant of hazard. A frequently told account says the game passed from England and France to North America, with a version developing in French-influenced New Orleans in the 1800s, and that the name craps may come from a French word for the lowest roll. The story is widely repeated but difficult to verify in detail, so it is best regarded as a plausible outline, not an established fact.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, craps spread through the United States, including to the military and to street games, and then to licensed casinos, where the casino banked the game and introduced a formalized table with fixed bets. A major change was the introduction of bets against the shooter and a defined layout, discussed in the craps table math. Different bets in the game have different edges. Some, like the pass line, have a relatively small edge, while proposition bets are much more costly.
Other dice games
Dice have been used in many other games. Sic bo, from China, uses three dice, and many other regional games exist, along with modern electronic versions. Dice also appear in tabletop games, in children’s games and in role-playing, which shows how general the device is.
What the history suggests
Dice are among the simplest random devices, and that simplicity explains their long history. A fair die has no memory: each throw is independent of the last. Claims that a throw can be controlled are discussed under dice control. What the long record suggests is that people have wagered on dice for a very long time, that cheating and regulation have a similarly long history, and that the odds of a fair die are the same today as they were thousands of years ago.