40 Fun Facts About Dice

Which Roman general is said to have declared that the die is cast as he crossed the Rubicon?

Julius Caesar was starting a civil war: leading his soldiers over that river in 49 BC defied a direct order from the Roman Senate.

Which physicist rejected quantum randomness with a famous remark about God not playing dice?

Albert Einstein made the remark in a 1926 letter to Max Born, convinced that a deeper, fully predictable theory lay beneath quantum chance.

In Monopoly, what does a player earn by throwing doubles, unless it happens three times in a row?

An extra turn follows each of the first two doubles, but a third in a row is punished: the player goes straight to jail without finishing the move.

Which five-dice game, marketed by Edwin S. Lowe, scores 50 points for five of a kind?

Yahtzee began as the Yacht Game, which Hasbro says an anonymous Canadian couple invented to play with friends aboard their boat.

Which nickname do gamblers give to a roll of double ones, the lowest total two dice can show?

Snake eyes is named for the way the two single spots look like a pair of beady eyes. The opposite roll, a pair of sixes, is known as boxcars.

In which film does every roll of the dice in a magical board game unleash a new jungle danger?

Jumanji is based on a 1981 picture book by Chris Van Allsburg, and the 1995 film starring Robin Williams became the first in a long-running series.

Fuzzy dice, a 1950s American car fad, are traditionally hung from which part of a vehicle?

The rearview mirror habit is believed to trace back to American fighter pilots of World War II, who hung dice above their instruments for luck.

Which word names the dots on a die, arranged so that opposite faces always add up to seven?

Pips also mark dominoes and playing cards, and the six faces of a standard die carry 21 of them in total.

Which British rock band released the single Tumbling Dice from the album Exile on Main St.?

The Rolling Stones recorded it in the basement of Villa Nellcôte in the south of France, where the band had moved as tax exiles.

In cooking, a recipe that tells the cook to dice an onion wants it cut into which shape?

Small cubes of an even size cook at the same rate, and the tiniest version, the brunoise, starts from food already cut julienne-style.

Which casino dice game, descended from English hazard, pays out on a first throw of seven or eleven?

Craps takes its name from crabs, old London slang for a losing throw of two or three. Seven wins so readily because it is the most common total of two dice.

Which dice board game raises the stakes with a marker numbered 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64?

Backgammon gained this stake marker in 1920s New York gaming clubs. It is never thrown like a die, only turned to show how far the stake has doubled.

Which fantasy game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson is played with a set of polyhedral dice?

Dungeons & Dragons uses a twenty-sided die to decide whether an attack hits, then dice with four to twelve sides to work out the damage.

Which game does Will Turner play against Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest?

Liar's dice is a bluffing contest in which each player hides a roll under a cup and bids on what lies beneath them all. It grew out of Dudo, a game said to date back to the Inca Empire.

Which classic war board game settles battles by throwing an attacker's dice against a defender's?

Risk was invented by a French film director and first sold in 1957 as The Conquest of the World. Its defenders win every tied throw, so attackers rely on having more dice.

Which word game starts with a player shaking sixteen lettered dice in a covered tray?

Boggle was invented by Allan Turoff and launched by Parker Brothers in 1973. The dice settle into a four-by-four grid, and players race a timer to spot words.

Which word describes dice secretly weighted by a cheat so that one side lands face up more often?

Loaded dice are the reason casinos favour see-through ones: tampering is easier to spot in clear plastic than in an opaque die.

Which Broadway musical has gambler Sky Masterson sing Luck Be a Lady as he bets on the dice?

Guys and Dolls draws its gamblers from Damon Runyon's short stories of the New York underworld, and it won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

In which Indian epic does Yudhishthira gamble away his kingdom in a rigged game of dice?

The Mahabharata has the wily Shakuni throw for the rival Kauravas, and the defeat sends the Pandava brothers into twelve years of forest exile.

Which children's board game traps its die inside a clear Pop-O-Matic dome that players press?

Trouble's dome makes a popping sound and keeps the die from being lost, or from being thrown in a way that cheats.

In which board game does a roll of seven move the robber onto a hex and stop it producing resources?

Catan, designed by Klaus Teuber, also lets whoever moves the robber steal a card from a neighbour. The piece begins the game out on the desert.

Which three-dice party game, played in groups of four, shares its name with a word for a swindle?

Bunco is said to have begun as a confidence game, lending its name to the gambling parlors of 1850s San Francisco and then to any swindle.

Which six-dice family game gives its own name to a throw that scores nothing and ends the turn?

Farkle is a folk game with many names, among them Zilch and Ten Thousand, and a player who has farkled loses every point from that turn.

The twenty-sided die used in tabletop role-playing games takes the form of which geometric shape?

An icosahedron has twenty triangular faces, and examples marked with Greek letters survive from Ptolemaic Egypt, long before modern gaming.

The knucklebones thrown as early dice in ancient Greece came from which joint of a sheep or goat?

Ankle bones can land on only four sides, and unevenly: the two broad faces turn up far more often than the two narrow ones.

Which English king is said to have lost a set of St Paul's bells on a single throw of the dice?

Henry VIII staked the bells of the Jesus Chapel against £100 from the courtier Sir Miles Partridge, who won and had them broken up.

Which pub game has players flip down tiles numbered one to nine to match each roll of the dice?

Shut the Box was recorded in Manchester pubs in the 1960s, and one account from the time calls it a native of the Channel Islands.

In tabletop role-playing games, a natural 20 on an attack roll usually earns which powerful result?

A critical hit turns up one time in twenty on such a throw, and the idea entered role-playing in 1975 with the game Empire of the Petal Throne.

On traditional Asian-style dice, the single spot of the one face is usually painted which colour?

Red also marks the four on Asian-style dice, whose spots vary in size and sit closer to the centre of each face than on Western ones.

Five dice in a standard role-playing set share their shapes with which family of regular polyhedra?

Platonic solids are named for Plato, who proposed in his dialogue Timaeus that the classical elements were built from these shapes.

At a casino dice table, which name is given to the player whose turn it is to throw?

The shooter chooses two dice from several offered by the stickman, and has to place a bet on the outcome before throwing them.

A board game with pyramid-shaped dice was unearthed in the royal cemetery of which Sumerian city?

Ur lent its name to the Royal Game of Ur, whose rules a British Museum curator pieced together from a Babylonian clay tablet.

Blaise Pascal founded probability theory in letters on gambling puzzles with which fellow Frenchman?

Pierre de Fermat was a lawyer who treated mathematics as a hobby, and the 1654 exchange was prompted by a gambler, the Chevalier de Méré.

Possibly the oldest dice ever found were dug up at the Burnt City, an ancient site in which country?

Iran's Burnt City, in the south-east of the country, yielded dice from between 2800 and 2500 BCE as part of a complete board game set.

Which word names the practice of telling fortunes by casting lots, bones or dice?

Cleromancy comes from kleros, the Greek for a lot, and the Bible has the sailors on Jonah's ship cast lots to learn who brought the storm on them.

Which Roman emperor, the successor of Caligula, wrote a book on the art of playing dice?

Claudius was teased for the habit after his death: a satire attributed to Seneca has him sentenced in the underworld to shake dice forever in a box with no bottom.

In the Roman game of knucklebones, the best throw of all was named after which goddess?

Venus was scored when every bone landed showing a different face, while the lowest throw in both Greece and Rome was known as the Dog.

Which English adjective for things governed by chance comes from the Latin for a game of dice?

Aleatory literally means depending on the throw of a die, and since the 1960s a sister word has described music with passages left to chance.

Which Italian physician and gambler wrote the first systematic study of the odds in games of chance?

Gerolamo Cardano wrote his Book on Games of Chance around 1564, complete with a section on how to cheat, but it went unpublished until 1663.

Which Canadian-born presenter hosted the 1970s American dice game show High Rollers on NBC?

Alex Trebek fronted the NBC show from 1974, a decade before he began a 37-season run as the host of Jeopardy!