Dice are the oldest gaming implements known to man!! It’s known that prehistoric man used dice much like ours, played dice games similar to our own and even cheated his opponents with loaded dice!

However, before dice became gaming pieces, these little numbered cubes were used as magical devices for divining the future. Astragalomancy is the practice of divination by the means of dice.

It’s guessed that primitive man probably used cubical knucklebones or the ankle bones of sheep for his gaming pieces. The Arabic word for knucklebone is in fact, the same for dice. Even today that’s probably why slang for dice is known as “bones”.

Archaeologists have shown that dice predate the written word, and can be found in almost every culture in the world, including the American Indian, Eskimo, and African. Excavations in Egypt have turned up stone dice dating from 2,000 BC that look remarkably similar to the modern thing.

These days modern man has improved both the manufacturing of dice and also the methods of loading them. Made from usually cellulose or plastic, there are basically 2 varieties, “casino” dice and “drugstore” dice.

Casinos dice are hand made, sawed from plastic rods, and are perfectly cubical to within one five thousandth of an inch. Each spot is drilled precisely 17 thousandths of an inch into the face, then it is filled with paint weighing exactly the same as the plastic removed from the hole. This keeps all sides of the dice balanced. Balanced is great but we’ve all heard of loaded dice. This is when some kind of weight is placed inside of the dice against one face so the opposite side will come up more often then one might expect.

Despite everything out there dice remain, quite simply, the best way of introducing chance to any game, no matter how complex. As the title of one of Mallarme’s most famous pomes, “A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance.”