History of Dice: From Knucklebones to Yahtzee

People have been throwing objects to let chance decide for at least five thousand years, and the cube with pips that you roll on this site has changed remarkably little in that time. This article follows dice from sheep ankle bones to the Craps table, the Yahtzee score sheet and the custom-faced dice of modern designer games. Dates are given where the evidence supports them and hedged where it does not.

Before the Cube: Knucklebones and Throwsticks

The ancestors of dice were not cubes. The most widespread early random generator was the astragalus, the ankle bone of a sheep or goat, known in English as a knucklebone. An astragalus has four distinct sides it can land on (the two ends are too rounded to rest on), and the sides are not equally likely, which suited it to both games and divination. The Wikipedia history of dice notes the hypothesis that dice grew out of fortune-telling with the talus bones of hoofed animals, and knucklebones have been found in Greek, Roman and Near Eastern sites in enormous numbers, made of bone, bronze, glass and stone.

Ancient Egypt used a different device. The board game senet, played before 3000 BCE, was driven by throwsticks: flat sticks with one marked side, thrown together and counted like coins. Cubical dice appear in Egypt later; several popular histories cite examples from around 2000 BCE, though the dating of individual museum pieces varies, and knucklebones were still in use there in the New Kingdom, including among the objects in Tutankhamun’s tomb.

The idea that dice are older than writing is probably right. What we cannot do is name the first die, because a bone that was thrown for fun leaves no trace of the rules.

The First Cubes: Mesopotamia, Iran and the Indus Valley

Three regions produce the earliest objects that are unmistakably dice, all from roughly the same era.

• Ur, Mesopotamia (about 2600 BCE). The Royal Game of Ur boards excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s came with tetrahedral (four-sided) dice, pyramids with two of their four corners marked so that each throw gave a yes-or-no result.
• Shahr-e Sukhteh, the Burnt City, Iran (about 2800 to 2500 BCE). A grave here held a board game with 60 pieces and dice, frequently described as the world’s oldest backgammon set. The dice are often called the oldest known, though “possibly” is the honest qualifier, because the dating range overlaps with other finds.
• Skara Brae, Orkney (about 3100 to 2400 BCE). Bone dice were found in this Neolithic village, showing that the idea reached the far north of Europe independently of the Near East, or at least very early.
• Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, Indus Valley (about 2500 to 1900 BCE). Terracotta cubical dice are common enough at these sites that excavators concluded dicing was an ordinary pastime. At least one Indus die has opposite faces adding to seven, the arrangement every modern die uses, though many others do not. Some researchers argue the cubical die itself originated here.

The lesson from these finds is that the six-sided cube was one solution among several. Four-sided pyramids, two-sided sticks and four-sided bones all coexisted with it for millennia.

Greece, Rome and India: Dice in the Ancient World

The Greeks credited the invention of dice to the hero Palamedes during the Trojan War, a story told by Sophocles, while Herodotus claimed the Lydians invented them during a famine to distract themselves from hunger. Neither is history; both show that by the fifth century BCE dice already seemed ancient.

Rome had two kinds. Tali were knucklebones, or imitations of them, thrown in fours and scored by their four unequal sides, valued 1, 3, 4 and 6. The best throw, with each bone showing a different side, was the Venus; the worst, all 1s, was the dog (canis). Tesserae were cubes like ours, usually thrown in threes from a cup, with three 6s the top score. Gambling with dice was technically illegal in Rome outside the December festival of Saturnalia, and equally universal. Suetonius records that the emperor Augustus played constantly, staked his guests from his own purse and joked in letters about his losses, and the emperor Claudius reportedly wrote a book on dice play that has not survived.

India has the oldest literary account of dice addiction. Hymn 10.34 of the Rigveda, usually called the Gambler’s Lament, is the monologue of a man ruined by the “brown nuts” of the vibhidaka tree, which were used as dice; the text is generally dated to the late second millennium BCE. In the Mahabharata, the epic’s central catastrophe is a rigged dice match in which Yudhishthira loses his kingdom, his brothers and his wife to Shakuni’s loaded dice. Cheating with dice, in other words, is as old as the games.

Medieval Europe and the Game of Hazard

Dice survived the fall of Rome without difficulty. Church and civil authorities across medieval Europe issued repeated bans on dice play, which is itself evidence of how common it was.

The game that mattered most was Hazard, a two-dice game in which the caster named a “main” between 5 and 9 and then tried to throw it, or a related “chance” number, before throwing out. A tradition recorded by the twelfth-century chronicler William of Tyre says Crusaders devised it during the siege of a castle called Hazarth or Asart; historians treat the story as a folk etymology rather than fact. What is certain is that Chaucer’s Pardoner describes young men “pleyinge atte hasard” in the fourteenth century, so the game was familiar in England by the 1300s.

Hazard reached its peak in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester (1674) called it “the most bewitching Game that is plaid on the Dice,” and the game was a fixture of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, above all Crockford’s in the early nineteenth century, where fortunes were won and lost in a night. Losing throws of 2 or 3 were called crabs in English slang, and by 1792 the game had reached France as krabs; the spelling craps is recorded by 1818.

From Hazard to Craps

The American chapter begins in New Orleans. Around 1805 the young Creole landowner Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville returned from London with a passion for Hazard and introduced it to Louisiana society. The traditional account credits Marigny with simplifying the game by fixing the main at 7, which is exactly the modern game; more cautious historians suggest the simplification happened among the working-class and enslaved players who took the game up along the Mississippi. Either way, Marigny named a street in his Faubourg Marigny subdivision Rue de Craps, and the game traveled upriver under the names pass and craps.

Early craps had a structural flaw: with only the Pass bet available, a shooter with loaded dice could not be bet against. In about 1907 the Philadelphia dice maker John H. Winn designed a layout with a Don’t Pass space, letting players bet against the shooter and removing the incentive to cheat. Every casino table descends from his design. Craps then spread with the American military in the Second World War and became the signature table game of postwar Las Vegas. The version on our Craps page, with the Pass Line, Don’t Pass, odds bets and hardways, is Winn’s layout essentially unchanged.

Folk Games of the Tavern and the Kitchen Table

Not every dice game has a paper trail, and the honest history of most folk games is short.

Shut the Box is traditionally said to have been played by fishermen in Normandy and the Channel Islands, with some retellings pushing it back to the twelfth century. None of that is documented. The record begins in the 1950s and 1960s, when the game arrived in English pubs (one account names a Channel Islander called “Chalky” Towbridge, in 1958) and spread with the help of brewery promotions.

Ship, Captain and Crew carries nautical vocabulary and is routinely described as a sailors’ game, but no primary source records where or when it was first played. Its rules, unusually for a folk game, are almost identical in every published account.

Bunco can be traced more precisely. It descends from an English game called eight-dice cloth, reached San Francisco as a gambling game in 1855, and lent its name to the crooked “bunco parlors” of the late nineteenth century, which is why bunco still means a swindle in American English. The modern social version, with twelve players at three tables, dates from a revival in the 1980s and the founding of the World Bunco Association in 1996.

Pig has no known inventor. Its first appearance in print is John Scarne’s Scarne on Dice (1945), which presented it as a game already in circulation. In 2004 Todd Neller and Clifton Presser of Gettysburg College computed its optimal strategy, turning a one-sentence game into a classic teaching example in probability and computer science.

Liar’s Dice is played across South America as dudo. A popular story says the Inca ruler Atahualpa taught it to Francisco Pizarro in 1532; there is no evidence for this, and six-sided dice were most likely brought to the Andes by the Spanish rather than the other way around. The boxed game Perudo was created after Cosmo Fry encountered dudo in Peru in 1982 and, with his Peruvian partner Alfredo Fernandini, launched it in London in 1989. Milton Bradley had published a boxed Liar’s Dice in the United States in 1987, and Richard Borg’s Bluff won Germany’s Spiel des Jahres in 1993.

Poker Dice and Yacht: The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Card poker took shape in New Orleans and on the Mississippi riverboats in the early 1800s, and it did not take long for someone to put the hand rankings on dice. According to the ETH Zurich library’s history of the game, the first patent for poker dice bearing card faces was issued in 1881, with an eight-sided version following in 1888. The six-face set of Ace, King, Queen, Jack, Ten and Nine became standard, and the bar-room game of five dice and three rolls is the one on our Dice Poker page.

Poker dice fed directly into the category games of the 1930s. Yacht, in which five dice are rolled up to three times to fill twelve scoring categories, appears in print in The Complete Book of Games by Clement Wood and Gloria Goddard, published in New York in 1938; its three-dice contemporary Crag appears in the same period. Yacht in turn is related to the Latin American game Generala. The Yahtzee vs Yatzy comparison shows how the Scandinavian branch of this family diverged.

Yacht Becomes Yahtzee

In 1956 the toy entrepreneur Edwin S. Lowe, who had built his fortune selling bingo sets in the 1930s, acquired the rights to a version of Yacht from a Canadian couple who, by Lowe’s account, played it aboard their yacht with friends and asked only for 1,000 gift sets in return. Lowe renamed it Yahtzee, trademarked the name and launched it through the E. S. Lowe Company. Early sales were poor because the rules did not sell themselves from a box, so Lowe hosted “Yahtzee parties” to let people learn by playing. Word of mouth did the rest.

Milton Bradley bought the E. S. Lowe Company in 1973, and Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley in 1984. Hasbro still publishes the game and states that about 50 million Yahtzee sets are sold every year. The modern scorecard, with its 35-point upper bonus, 100-point bonus for extra Yahtzees and Joker rule, is the version you can play on our Yahtzee page, and the Yahtzee score sheet guide walks through every box.

Farkle, Ten Thousand and the Push-Your-Luck Family

The six-dice banking game known as Farkle, Ten Thousand, Dix Mille, Zilch, Zonk, Greed, Squelch or Hot Dice has no inventor and no reliable origin date. Stories that it arrived in North America on French ships in the 1600s, or that dice and rules from the 1700s were found at Fort de Chartres in Illinois, circulate without documentation; the tale of a medieval knight named Sir Albert Farkle is almost certainly a joke. What can be said is that the game was an established folk game by the mid-1980s, played with a hundred local scoring tables.

The commercial history is firmer. Pocket Farkel has been sold since 1996 by Legendary Games, whose founders registered trademarks around the name and their scoring table. The boxed Farkle with a shaker cup and score pad is published by PlayMonster (formerly Patch Products, founded 1985). The Farkle vs Ten Thousand comparison explains how the branded table differs from the folk versions.

The Designer Dice Game Era

For most of the twentieth century, dice games were either gambling games or family fillers. That changed when hobby game designers began building custom dice with symbols instead of pips, combining them with cards, boards and player powers.

• Left Center Right sits on the boundary. George & Company of Buffalo, New York began selling the game in 1983 and marketed it exclusively as LCR from 1992, dates established in a 2009 federal appeals court ruling in a trademark case. The underlying chip-passing game is older and in the public domain.
• Zombie Dice, designed by Steve Jackson and released by Steve Jackson Games in 2010, put a push-your-luck game into a cup of thirteen custom dice and won the 2011 Origins Award for Best Family, Children’s or Party Game.
• King of Tokyo, by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield and published by IELLO in 2011, added monsters, power cards and a Yahtzee-style three-roll turn, and became one of the best-selling hobby games of the decade.
• Elder Sign, by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson for Fantasy Flight Games in 2011, showed that dice could carry a cooperative horror game.
• Qwixx, by Steffen Benndorf for Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag in 2012, was nominated for the 2013 Spiel des Jahres and launched the roll-and-write boom, in which everyone shares the dice and marks a private sheet. Its publisher reports more than three million copies sold; our Qwixx score sheet guide covers the sheet in detail.
• Roll For It, by Chris Leder, was pitched to Calliope Games at Gen Con in 2012, funded on Kickstarter in 2013 and released later that year.

What unites these games is a willingness to change the die itself. After five thousand years of pips, the face of a die can now be a brain, a claw, a shotgun or a lock symbol, and the games built on them have brought dice back to the center of the hobby.

The dice found at Ur, Skara Brae and Mohenjo-daro would be recognized instantly by anyone playing Craps or Yahtzee today, and a Roman throwing tesserae from a cup would understand the Liar’s Dice cup without instruction. Dice survive because they are the simplest fair machine ever made: six faces, equal odds, no memory. The mathematics of those faces is laid out in our guide to dice probability, and the vocabulary that has grown up around them, from natural to hot dice, is collected in the dice game glossary.