Dice are among the oldest gaming tools in use today. Long before cubes with dotted faces became standard, people in North Africa were casting small animal bones to decide how a game would play out. The same idea of a random result sits behind many online casino games now, even though the throw has moved onto a screen. 

Knucklebones and the first games of chance 

The earliest dice weren't cubes at all. They were astragali, the small ankle bones of sheep and goats. An astragalus has four long sides it can come to rest on, which makes it a simple way to produce a random result. 

Egyptian tomb paintings show astragali being used in board games as early as 3500 BC. Archaeologists at Thebes in Upper Egypt have also recovered knucklebone gaming pieces dated to around 1550 BC, roughly 3,500 years ago.  

These pieces were used in race games such as Senet and the Game of 20 Squares, where players moved counters across a board based on each throw. Hounds and Jackals, another Egyptian board game from around 1800 BC, worked in the same way. The bones decided the move and the players followed the result. 

Why the bones weren't equal 

Astragali don't land evenly. Greek and Roman writers later numbered the four sides one, three, four and six. The narrow one and six sides show up around 10% of the time, while the broader three and four sides appear around 40% of the time. 

That uneven spread is one reason shaped dice took over. A cube with equal faces gives every number the same chance of appearing on each throw. 

From bone to cube 

Cubic dice were in use in the Near East by the third millennium BC. Early versions arranged their dots in several different ways, and the layout used today, where opposite faces add up to seven, only became common later.