Dice
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40 free Dice trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Dice are among the oldest gaming tools on Earth. People were throwing marked bones long before anyone wrote the rules down, and the same little objects still decide everything from a family board game to a fortune at a casino table. This quiz follows the whole story. Most of it is about the dice games people actually play, from party favourites and pub classics to casino tables and tabletop role-playing, along with the slang, the odds and the cheats that grew up around them. The rest digs into ancient history and tracks dice into films, songs, the kitchen and the dictionary. It is written for game-night regulars, quiz hosts and anyone who has ever blown on a pair of dice for luck. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Roman general is said to have declared that the die is cast as he crossed the Rubicon?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar was starting a civil war: leading his soldiers over that river in 49 BC defied a direct order from the Roman Senate.
Q 02Which physicist rejected quantum randomness with a famous remark about God not playing dice?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein made the remark in a 1926 letter to Max Born, convinced that a deeper, fully predictable theory lay beneath quantum chance.
Q 03In Monopoly, what does a player earn by throwing doubles, unless it happens three times in a row?
An extra turn
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.
Q 04Which five-dice game, marketed by Edwin S. Lowe, scores 50 points for five of a kind?
Yahtzee
Yahtzee began as the Yacht Game, which Hasbro says an anonymous Canadian couple invented to play with friends aboard their boat.
Q 05Which nickname do gamblers give to a roll of double ones, the lowest total two dice can show?
Snake eyes
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.
Q 06In which film does every roll of the dice in a magical board game unleash a new jungle danger?
Jumanji
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.
Q 07Fuzzy dice, a 1950s American car fad, are traditionally hung from which part of a vehicle?
Rearview mirror
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.
Q 08Which word names the dots on a die, arranged so that opposite faces always add up to seven?
Pips
Pips also mark dominoes and playing cards, and the six faces of a standard die carry 21 of them in total.
Q 09Which British rock band released the single Tumbling Dice from the album Exile on Main St.?
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones recorded it in the basement of Villa Nellcôte in the south of France, where the band had moved as tax exiles.
Q 10In cooking, a recipe that tells the cook to dice an onion wants it cut into which shape?
Small cubes
Small cubes of an even size cook at the same rate, and the tiniest version, the brunoise, starts from food already cut julienne-style.
Q 11Which casino dice game, descended from English hazard, pays out on a first throw of seven or eleven?
Craps
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.
Q 12Which dice board game raises the stakes with a marker numbered 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64?
Backgammon
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.
Q 13Which fantasy game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson is played with a set of polyhedral dice?
Dungeons & Dragons
Q 21In which board game does a roll of seven move the robber onto a hex and stop it producing resources?
Catan
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.
Q 22Which three-dice party game, played in groups of four, shares its name with a word for a swindle?
Bunco
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.
Q 23Which six-dice family game gives its own name to a throw that scores nothing and ends the turn?
Farkle
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.
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.
Q 14Which game does Will Turner play against Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest?
Liar's dice
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.
Q 15Which classic war board game settles battles by throwing an attacker's dice against a defender's?
Risk
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.
Q 16Which word game starts with a player shaking sixteen lettered dice in a covered tray?
Boggle
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.
Q 17Which word describes dice secretly weighted by a cheat so that one side lands face up more often?
Loaded
Loaded dice are the reason casinos favour see-through ones: tampering is easier to spot in clear plastic than in an opaque die.
Q 18Which Broadway musical has gambler Sky Masterson sing Luck Be a Lady as he bets on the dice?
Guys and Dolls
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.
Q 19In which Indian epic does Yudhishthira gamble away his kingdom in a rigged game of dice?
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata has the wily Shakuni throw for the rival Kauravas, and the defeat sends the Pandava brothers into twelve years of forest exile.
Q 20Which children's board game traps its die inside a clear Pop-O-Matic dome that players press?
Trouble
Trouble's dome makes a popping sound and keeps the die from being lost, or from being thrown in a way that cheats.
Q 24The twenty-sided die used in tabletop role-playing games takes the form of which geometric shape?
Icosahedron
An icosahedron has twenty triangular faces, and examples marked with Greek letters survive from Ptolemaic Egypt, long before modern gaming.
Q 25The knucklebones thrown as early dice in ancient Greece came from which joint of a sheep or goat?
Ankle
Ankle bones can land on only four sides, and unevenly: the two broad faces turn up far more often than the two narrow ones.
Q 26Which English king is said to have lost a set of St Paul's bells on a single throw of the dice?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII staked the bells of the Jesus Chapel against £100 from the courtier Sir Miles Partridge, who won and had them broken up.
Q 27Which pub game has players flip down tiles numbered one to nine to match each roll of the dice?
Shut the Box
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.
Q 28In tabletop role-playing games, a natural 20 on an attack roll usually earns which powerful result?
Critical hit
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.
Q 29On traditional Asian-style dice, the single spot of the one face is usually painted which colour?
Red
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.
Q 30Five dice in a standard role-playing set share their shapes with which family of regular polyhedra?
Platonic solids
Platonic solids are named for Plato, who proposed in his dialogue Timaeus that the classical elements were built from these shapes.