Over on Awesome Dice you’ll find a remarkable post and infographic. Yeah; it’s about dice… but it’s a deep dive on the history of dice, going back to 3100 BCE, to the Egyptian era that surfaced the first d12 and up to modern day.
I was impressed. I asked Brian Wood of Awesome Dice to introduce the research.
As gamers we’ve always been big fans of dice — so much so that we started a dice store — and every now and then we’d see a news story about ancient dice unearthed at some archeological dig. We were talking about some of these old dice and got into the inevitable discussion about what the oldest dice ever found were.
The process of trying to answer that question is what led to this research. It was quite a bit harder than we expected — this is one of those cases where we couldn’t trust what some guy on the internet said (Wikipedia) and kept finding conflicting reports or claims with no sources or documentation. Eventually we compiled all of the interesting finds and firsts into this graphic to give a pretty good overview of the history of dice. I’m sure there’s some awesome old dice finds out there that we’ve missed, but on the very oldest end I’m pretty confident we got the oldest origins of dice pinned down — and I have to say that I’m surprised that the oldest ones were d4s and not d6s!
Via Awesome Dice.
