From the tavern to Knucklebones: why big games have dice of their own

The first The Witcher of 2007 has a game that many players remember: dice poker in a tavern. Five six-sided dice, a re-roll, poker combinations, several rounds. You sit in a tavern and take your opponent's coins.

It is not an exception. In many big games there is a tavern somewhere, and dice in the tavern. This article looks at which games do this, what their authors say about it, and what follows for a game that has made dice its main mechanic.

Overview: dice as a side game

Game	Year	What is played	Verified detail
The Witcher	2007	dice poker, five dice, re-rolling	the Enhanced Edition (2008) made the opponents stronger
The Witcher 2	2011	dice poker, the dice are thrown physically	one round per game (according to a fan wiki)
The Witcher 3	2015	dice poker did not return, Gwent replaced it	the designer Damien Monnier said they did not want to bring back a game that they felt they could not improve
Kingdom Come: Deliverance	2018	a tavern dice game of the Farkle type: six dice, setting aside ones and fives	false dice are in both games; the sequel (2025) adds badges that change the rules
Assassin's Creed Valhalla	2020	Orlog, an original dice game	according to Ubisoft, more than 80% of players tried it
Cult of the Lamb	2022	Knucklebones, a duel on a 3 × 3 board	equal values in a column multiply and cancel the opponent's equal dice
Yakuza / Like a Dragon	several	Chō-han (even or odd), in some also Cee-lo	Yakuza 0 has both
Baldur's Gate 3	2020 to 2023	a visible d20 for ability checks	a golden d20 on a critical hit
Disco Elysium	2019	skill checks by a roll of two six-sided dice
Dicey Dungeons	2019	the whole game: you roll dice and place them in your equipment	Terry Cavanagh
Slice & Dice	2022 to 2024	the whole game: five heroes, each with dice of their own	version 3.0 and Steam on 20 Mar 2024
Mario Party	1998	progress along the board is decided by a die with values 1 to 10	Hudson Soft
Genshin Impact	2022	Genius Invokation cards with dice as the resource	version 3.3

Three notes on the table. Red Dead Redemption (2010) has Liar's Dice, while its sequel of 2018 does not. Balatro (2024) is often mentioned alongside dice, but it is played with cards: it is poker in a roguelike wrapper and, according to the publisher, it has sold more than five million copies. Similarly Luck Be a Landlord is a game with a slot machine, not with dice. Both games often stand next to dice games, because together they make one trend: poker and chance as the foundation of a long game with progression.

What is known first-hand about tavern dice

The best documented story is Orlog. Ubisoft described it in 2021, and its developers said several things that are conveyed here only as a paraphrase:

Orlog was meant to be tavern entertainment for relaxation in a historically accurate setting.
The designers found old dice but not their rules, which gave them freedom. They played the prototypes with real dice with stickers on them.
More than 80% of players tried the game and about 20% played more than ten games. According to Ubisoft, a typical optional minigame reaches ten games with five percent of players or fewer.

Let us remember the last sentence. It is a rare number about what players do with minigames: a well-made dice game attracted four times more people than the average.

From the other side: CD Projekt speaks of minigames as a way of relaxing without combat and of deepening the characters. Gwent originally had a zero budget and was made largely in free time. The minigame later became a standalone game, which was no longer cheap work.

And the claim that dice in games are a cheap way to fill time was not found in reliable sources. Only opinion pieces were found, one of which is a paid guest post with links to casinos. That is why this article does not speak of "cheap content".

Why dice, probably: reflections and what is documented

From the available sources and from the point of view of design, this picture can be put together:

The tavern is an old backdrop. Gambling in a tavern is a traditional symbol of the world of an era, be it the Middle Ages, the Viking age or the Wild West. It takes the game "under the skin" of its setting.
Risk and reward come at once. You roll, you see, you decide whether to risk again. It is a good change of pace from long quests.
The die is a symbol. Larian (Baldur's Gate 3) says that dice are the identity of tabletop D&D, so they must be visible but accessible. That is why BG3 has a visible d20, while most combat rolls are hidden.
The rules are small. A dice game can be explained in a minute. In an RPG that already has a hundred systems that is an advantage.

Points 1, 2 and 4 are reflection, not a finding. Point 3 comes from statements by the studio Larian from 2020. The exact reason why some games gave dice up (The Witcher 3) is not in the sources: the interview says only that they did not want to bring back a game that they could not improve.

Depth: why tavern poker is good only for an hour

Here comes a measurement of our own from the development of Audamir. When a casino with dice poker was being considered (see Boxes with visible chances (forthcoming article no. 12)), a proposal arose for an exact calculation: five dice, two re-rolls, an optimal strategy computed by dynamic programming. The measurement was then repeated from the beginning, with a tool and with nine payout tables that are written out: How deep is dice poker?. The result on table B (five of a kind pays 10 bets, four of a kind 6, full house 4, straight 3, three of a kind 2, two pairs 1 and a pair 0.5):

The simple strategy "keep the most frequent value" reaches 96.8% of the optimum (322% against 333% for ideal play).
With no re-rolling only 34.3% of the optimum (114%).

With seven further tables the rule reaches 95.3 to 99.9% of the optimum; the exception is one that pays a straight the same as four of a kind and a full house: there it is 79.7%. The result therefore depends on the table.

In other words: after an hour of play in such a game there is nothing left to discover. It is a pleasant tavern for one evening. That is exactly the role that game has in The Witcher. And it is also a possible (not documented by sources!) reason why CD Projekt did not follow up on dice poker and built something that can be improved instead. In short: dice are good for flavour, but for the main course you need depth.

From this follows a strict condition in the plans of the game: the plan of a dice duel with a boss (Boss duel, a dice action game) has a criterion set. First a prototype without a screen is made that measures the winning chance of a random strategy, of a simple rule and of the optimal strategy. The proposed limits: a difference between the optimum and chance of at least 25 percentage points and between the optimum and the simple rule of at least 5. If the prototype does not meet these limits, the idea is dropped. According to the plan of extensions it is a crowded genre (Slice & Dice, Dicey Dungeons, Balatro), and without depth there is no reason to add another game.

Dice as the main mechanic

There is the opposite case: a game in which the die is not a minigame but the foundation. There are more such games than people realise:

Risk (1957 in France, 1959 in the USA): the attacker rolls at most three dice, the defender at most two, a tie goes to the defender.
Dungeons & Dragons (1974): the twenty-sided die for an attack.
Catan (1995, Klaus Teuber): two dice decide which territories give resources; more than 32 million boxes sold by 2020.
King of Tokyo (2011, Richard Garfield): six dice with re-rolling, like Yahtzee.
Yahtzee (1956).

Dice Wars belongs to the same family as Risk. And there is one thing to see here: in a game like Risk or Dice Wars the die decides the result, but the decision is yours. Where you attack, with what and when matters more than the roll. That is the difference from tavern poker, where you decide only which dice to re-roll.

What I take from it

Dice are flavour and foundation. For flavour a small rule is enough, for a foundation depth is needed.
Measure the depth before you start building. 96.8% of the optimum on table B is a figure that saves months, but it holds for that table.
If you want a minigame to be played, make it a rest. Orlog was tried by more than 80% of players and more than ten games were played by about 20%, four times more than with a typical minigame. Its makers describe it as a rest in a tavern, not as an ambition.
Beware of the sources. A large part of the texts about "gambling minigames in RPGs" is opinion and advertising.

Sources and notes

Orlog: Ubisoft, Assassin's Creed Valhalla: An Oral Orlog History (20 May 2021). The Witcher: Wikipedia; PC Gamer, The making of Gwent (7 Apr 2016); Game Developer on the creation of Gwent (26 Apr 2016).
Baldur's Gate 3: PC Gamer on the visible d20 and Hollywood Reporter (February 2020).
Cult of the Lamb: the wiki on Knucklebones. An official standalone game was not found (fan clones exist; a report of an official physical set is unconfirmed). Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Farkle: the fan wiki on Fandom, the pages Dice and Dice (KCD2) (medium certainty).
Further games: Dicey Dungeons, Slice & Dice, Balatro (5 million copies is a claim by the publisher from January 2025), Disco Elysium, Mario Party. Luck Be a Landlord: Steam.
Games where the die decides: Risk, Dungeons & Dragons, Catan, King of Tokyo, Yahtzee.
The measurement of the depth of poker: How deep is dice poker? (a tool, nine payout tables and the verification; measured on 5 Nov 2026). Unverified: the dice minigames in Final Fantasy, Fable or Skyrim were not searched in depth; the claim that dice are cheap content was not found in reliable sources.