Audamir

part 03

From bones to Ludo: a long history of throwing dice

When was a die first thrown? Nobody knows exactly. A survey from graves in Iran through the Mahabharata and the Indian Ludo to the first rules of probability, and a table of chances from the game this series is about.

Story and background

· updated 5 November 2026 · 14 min read

The die is probably the simplest generator of chance that people have invented: six faces, six results, the same chance. But there is also something slightly uncomfortable about it. Dice are so old that nobody can say who rolled the first one, and anyone who tries to say it runs into a contradiction between the sources today.

This article has five things in it: what is known about the oldest dice, how the game Ludo and its relatives came about, where else in the world dice were played, how the mathematics of chance grew out of them, and what of this can be seen in the game Audamir.

The oldest dice: two competing answers

Asking where the oldest dice are makes sense only if we agree on what a die is. Depending on that, there are two answers.

Dice from the Indus. The most firmly dated die of the Old World is a terracotta die from Mohenjo-daro, two centimetres on a side, dated by the Ashmolean Museum to 2500 to 1900 BC. The museum calls it unusual: the sum of opposite faces is seven, a rule we will come back to.

Sets from Iran and Mesopotamia. From a grave at Shahr-e Sukhteh (the Burnt City) in Iran comes a game with a board of twenty squares, 27 pieces and four dice, dated to about 2600 to 2400 BC. From the same period is the Royal Game of Ur in the British Museum: a board from the royal graves, excavated by Leonard Woolley in 1926 to 1927. The rules were lost until Irving Finkel deciphered them in the early 1980s from a cuneiform tablet of about 177 BC. It was played with four-sided dice that have two marked corners.

The claim that the game from Shahr-e Sukhteh has "the oldest dice in the world" could not be verified, and popular articles about it contradict each other in the details. The safest sentence is: the priority of the oldest die is disputed, and the oldest dice are from the Old World, from the period around 2600 to 1900 BC.

Three more things are worth mentioning:

  • The Egyptian senet was not played with dice but with flat throwing sticks. The oldest undoubted picture of the game is from the tomb of Hesy-Ra of about 2620 BC. The rules are conjecture to this day.
  • Ankle bones (astragali) are, according to one hypothesis, the predecessors of dice. The Romans had large tali with four usable faces and smaller tesserae numbered 1 to 6.
  • The Chinese Liubo was played with six long sticks and was very popular in the Warring States period (476 to 221 BC) and under the Han dynasty. The rules were lost.

Dice that were not fair, and why it did not matter

A die today is a precise object. Casino dice are made of cellulose acetate, measure 3/4 inch with a tolerance of 1/5000 inch (19.05 mm ± 0.005 mm), have sharp edges and drilled pips filled with paint of the same density.

Old dice looked different. The researchers Jelmer Eerkens (University of California, Davis) and Alex de Voogt (Drew University) examined 28 Roman dice unearthed in the Netherlands and found that 24 of them are asymmetric, with a tendency toward the one and the six. The experiment showed that the makers probably did not put the six on the largest face out of malice but because there was most room for pips there. According to them, some Romans may have believed that the throws were governed by fate, while others may have noticed over time that the one and the six come up more often. The die was not a tool of fairness, it was a tool for an answer.

Interesting too is the old convention that opposite faces add up to seven. According to one study this rule has held for more than two thousand years (with 159 exceptions); according to another (a Dutch sample) medieval dice followed a different scheme (1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6 opposite each other) and the switch to the seven-sum came around the year 1450. What can be said safely is this: it is an old convention, documented very early, but general only in the late Middle Ages.

And cheating? The London Museum has a set of 24 false dice from the end of the 15th century, from the bank of the Thames. X-rays revealed drops of mercury in them. False dice were then called fulhams.

From India to the whole world: the story of Ludo

The Mahabharata, one of the great Indian epics, has a game of dice at its centre: Yudhishthira plays against Shakuni and, according to tradition, loses his kingdom, his brothers, himself and his wife. It is an episode of gambling (dyūtam), and later art often depicts it as the game of chaupar.

Chaupar, or pachisi, was played on a cross-shaped board, with cowries (shells) as dice. The highest throw, 25, gave the game its name (pachīs). According to the court historian Abu'l Fazl, the courtyard in Fatehpur Sikri served under Akbar as a huge pachisi board during festivities. The common legend that the pieces were living girls is a 19th-century travel legend, and the contemporary chronicles do not speak of living pieces.

The story can be followed further by dates:

YearEvent
1870 to 1874the American firm Selchow & Righter buys the rights and registers the trademark Parcheesi
1890sLudo is sold in England (according to Wikipedia 1896, Alfred Coller; another source gives a patent of 1891 in the name of Collier, which could not be verified in the patent register)
winter 1907/1908in Munich Josef Friedrich Schmidt invents a game for his three sons, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht (in Slovak Človeče, nehnevaj sa, "Man, don't get angry"); first edition 1910, serial production from 1914
1914 to 1918Schmidt gives 3,000 pieces to the army and to military hospitals for free; by 1920 about a million were sold in the German-speaking area (according to the Neue Deutsche Biographie)

The Slovak Človeče, nehnevaj sa is a translation of the German title, and the game came to Slovakia from Germany. The exact date of its arrival in Slovakia could not be verified. The Czech Wikipedia speaks of sales under the title Člověče, nezlob se! as early as 1882. That figure could not be verified and is suspect, because both the Czech and the Slovak title are translations of the German title, which arose around 1907.

Other variants also belong to the family: the Spanish Parchís, the Colombian Parqués, the French Jeu des petits chevaux, the Swedish Fia, Uckers in the British navy and the Chinese Aeroplane chess. The German game has sold, according to various sources, tens of millions of copies (the numbers range from 60 to 100 million).

And then came the mobile era. Ludo King by the Indian firm Gametion came out in 2016 and, according to the company, had more than 400 million downloads in the summer of 2020, 500 million at the end of that year and a billion in 2023 or 2024. Its peak was during the first lockdown in 2020, with around 51 million daily active players. All these numbers come from the company itself or from its statements.

Dice around the world

Elsewhere in the world dice are played in other forms:

  • Japan, sugoroku. The chronicle Nihon shoki mentions that Emperor Temmu played sugoroku in 685 and that it was banned in 689 under Empress Jitō. Picture sugoroku (e-sugoroku) spread at the end of the 13th century and in the Edo period became very popular thanks to woodblock prints. Chō-han bakuchi (two dice in a bamboo cup, guessing whether the sum is even or odd) is connected with itinerant gamblers and later with the yakuza; the date of its origin could not be verified.
  • China. Bo-bing is played in Xiamen during the Mid-Autumn Festival: six dice are thrown into a large bowl, and the prizes are mooncakes (63 mooncakes according to the rules). It has been national intangible heritage since 2008. The legend of its origin in the 17th century under General Koxinga is not documented. Sic bo with three dice and 216 possible outcomes is stated to be ancient Chinese; nobody has documented the date.
  • The West. Dice were played in the game hazard, from which craps came: the word hazard is attested in English as early as Chaucer in the 14th century, the rules were fixed by Hoyle in 1790, and "crabs" (a two and a three) became "craps". The origin of Liar's dice and Perudo is linked to a legend about the Incas that nobody has documented.
  • Yahtzee came from the game Yacht, which was invented by an anonymous Canadian couple and played on a yacht; Edwin S. Lowe obtained the rights from them and in 1956 published it under the name Yahtzee. The Slovak or Czech "Generál" ("General") is not discussed here: it could not be verified that it is a separate, established game. There is a Czech game "Kostky" ("Dice"), which contains the combination "Generál" only as one of its figures.

Dice became mathematics

Dice are also the beginning of the theory of probability. Gerolamo Cardano wrote in the 16th century (parts around 1525, others around 1565) the treatise Liber de ludo aleae (On Casting the Die), published only in 1663. Galileo explained why with three dice a sum of 10 comes up more often than 9: there are 27 and 25 of the 216 ordered outcomes. The date of his writing is uncertain, about 1620 is given.

In 1654 Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat corresponded about problems put to them by the Chevalier de Méré. This is usually taken as the beginning of the calculus of probability. The first coherent treatise, De ratiociniis in ludo aleae, was published by Christiaan Huygens in 1657.

And then came war games. In 1812 the Prussian war councillor Georg Leopold von Reisswitz presented to King Frederick William III a game with a sand table, and his son published in 1824 a version with maps, fixed combat tables and five special dice that an umpire threw. H. G. Wells, in the book Little Wars (1913), on the contrary called for the umpire and chance to disappear, and there are no dice at the core of his rules. And Risk: Albert Lamorisse (the author of the film The Red Balloon) invented La Conquête du Monde, sold in France from 1957, and Parker Brothers published it in the USA in 1959 as Risk. The attacker rolls at most three dice, the defender at most two, and in a tie the defender wins. Dice Wars is of the same line: Wikipedia lists it among the freely distributed clones of Risk.

The last word belongs to the twenty-sided die. The first Dungeons & Dragons of 1974 came as three booklets and without dice. According to an academic study of 2024 (Peter D. Evan, Analog Game Studies), the Japanese Standards Association had been selling twenty-sided dice for generating random numbers since 1952, and wargamers adopted them in the late sixties. The American firm Creative Publications had in its offer a set of Platonic solids, which Gygax decided to sell through TSR. Whether they knew about the Japanese dice is, according to the study, conjecture.

Why dice attract us

Three findings from studies:

  • Near win. In an experiment of 2009 (Clark et al., the journal Neuron), near-wins were less pleasant for players than outright losses but increased the desire to keep playing, and only when the players felt they had influence. The experiment was done with a slot machine, not with dice.
  • The illusion of control. In a field study of craps in a casino, players bet more, and more riskily, when they threw themselves (Davis et al. 2000, cited second-hand).
  • Superstitions with dice. The sociologist James Henslin described in 1967 how craps players behave as if a soft or a hard throw influenced the number.

In Dice Wars every attack is a bet, so these mechanisms apply in full. That is why the game shows in its statistics the number of luck (wins minus expected wins): against the feeling that the dice were unfair to us stands a number.

Dice in Audamir

There is no die with a value in the game, the strength of a territory is the number of dice. The pips on them are decoration (the "Dots on the dice" setting switches them off; in the display of the rolls in an attack they stay, because they carry the result of the roll). A die is drawn as a rounded isometric cube in one of 24 real orientations, fixed for the tile, the column and the layer, so that it does not change when redrawn.

The chances of an attack follow from the rules, not from a feeling. This is the share of attacks that succeed, according to the game's own formula (Rules.winChance), for an attacker with 2 to 8 dice against a defender with 1 to 8 dice. In a tie the defender wins:

Attacker \ defender12345678
2 dice83.8%44.4%15.2%3.6%0.6%0.1%0.0%0.0%
3 dice97.3%77.9%45.4%19.2%6.1%1.5%0.3%0.0%
4 dice99.7%93.9%74.3%46.0%22.0%8.3%2.5%0.6%
5 dice100.0%98.8%90.9%71.8%46.4%24.2%10.4%3.7%
6 dice100.0%99.8%97.5%88.4%70.0%46.7%26.0%12.2%
7 dice100.0%100.0%99.5%96.2%86.2%68.5%46.9%27.4%
8 dice100.0%100.0%99.9%99.0%94.8%84.4%67.3%47.1%

Three regularities can be read from the table. With equal stacks the attacker succeeds in 44 to 47% of cases: the defender's advantage in a tie costs the attacker about three to six percentage points. One extra die is a big advantage: with four against three the attacker wins in 74% of cases, with five against four in 72%. And from a certain point it is superfluous: eight against three is a certainty (99.9%).

The game shows these chances directly on the borders between territories (the Hints setting). What to do with them is up to the player.

Sources and notes

The certainty differs for each claim; where the sources disagree, it is said in the text.