This dice roller is the analog of real dice in digital form. Whether playing a game, placing a bet, or just having fun, a virtual dice roller can provide you with 100% randomly generated results in seconds. As a bonus, you can select the number of dice.
And if it’s not enough for you to roll a six-sided die, there’s a secondary function where you can also change the number of sides on your dice. The possibilities are endless, as are each roll’s potential sums and results.
Dice in the ancient world
A die is one of the oldest playing objects known to humanity. But in ancient times, people used dice primarily for divination and religious rituals. And later, playing dice became a pastime.
In ancient times, people believed that the gods determined the outcome of games by tossing dice and other objects like them. The Romans had the goddess Fortuna, daughter of Jupiter, overseeing the dice throw. The Indians considered the gods Shiva and Parvati as the lords of fortune.
People could decide fairly serious matters with dice, such as getting an inheritance, the throne, or land division. Rolls of the dice were relied upon when guessing what the harvest or the military campaign would be.
For sure, it’s unknown when and where the first dice appeared in the world. There are different opinions about it. According to one version, they were invented by the Greek Palamedes during the siege of Troy, which lasted 10 years. Some say that the dice were invented in Lydia’s ancient country during King Atys’s reign. At that time, during a severe famine, gambling helped distract people from their troubles.
Archeologists’ findings tell us that dice appeared independently in many cultures. There can’t be a single source for the dice’s origin and the invention’s date.
In the early 2000s, Iranian archaeologists discovered in Shahr-e Sukhteh the oldest dice ever found. The research showed that these dice are about 5200 years old. By the way, these dice did not differ from those we know now. They had the same hexagonal shape and the same markings.
Ancient dice have been found in Egyptian and Sumerian tombs. However, they were two-sided and could only give two possibilities when rolled. In games of dice, people could use more than one die at a time. The Egyptians utilized four such flat sticks in the game Senet. They were painted on one side and were called “fingers.” There were six-sided cube dice in ancient Egypt, though people did not use them for games but for cult and religious activities. Senet was played before 3000 B.C. and up to the second century A.D.
Double-sided dice are labeled D2, unlike the more popular six-sided D6. By the way, we can still use the counterpart of the D2 dice today by tossing a two-sided coin.
Coin toss games were practiced in ancient times in many cultures. The Romans played the game Heads or Ships (Capita Aut Navia). It got this name because the heads of gods and rulers were depicted on one side of the coins and ships on the other.
The rules of the coin game were different than they are today. The Romans did not, as we do today, make their prediction of the winning side of the coin. One of the actors had a “head”. Since the emperor was on the side of the “head,” he was thought to agree with whoever won. The person who got the “ship” always lost.
Later, in the culture of games came four-sided dice. They began to be used by nomadic tribes of Hyksos, who invaded Egypt from Mesopotamia around the 18th and 16th centuries B.C. The tetrahedrons quickly entered that era’s gaming culture, combining with pre-existing gambling accessories. In Egypt, people used two-sided sticks and boards to play Senet. On the back of the board, the Egyptians began making fields for Tiau, the game where they used 4-sided dice.
The Greeks and Romans adopted dice in both religious rituals and games.
Two types of dice were popular in ancient Greece and Rome – tali and tesserae. Tetrahedral tali looked like oblong sticks with four elongated faces marked with numbers 1, 3, 4, and 6. The tesserae looked much like our modern hexagonal cubic dice. Tali and tesserae were shaken and thrown from a bowl called a frithillum, pyrgus or turricula.
The game of tali was played with four dice. The player got the best result when each dice showed a different number. The game of tesserae was played with three dice, and the best result was given by three sixes. The Greeks played with only two dice.
When Alexander the Great began expanding his empire, 6-sided dice started gaining popularity in Asia and India. In the ancient Indian chess game, Chaturaja, a roll of such tetrahedral dice determined which piece would move.
The tetrahedral dice were used in the north of Europe up to the middle of the XX century in the Daldøs and Sáhkku games.
The classical hexagonal dice became very popular in Greece and Rome. In Greece and Rome, such cubes were made of bone, bronze, agate, crystal, onyx, alabaster, marble, and amber. These cubes were almost identical to our modern ones.