Dice'n Games - The Blog of All Things Dice

Though dice are typically used to randomize events or check against the odds of success, they also have a good use in keeping records and are probably the cheapest way to do it. There are many non-pencil and paper games that want you to keep track of hit points during game play. This is most easily done using dice near the targets, since writing them down means you have to keep erasing and remarking. Dice are also useful when keeping track of ammunition. In cases like this, I hig …

There are apps out there now which allow players to easily roll whatever dice they want. They're fast, they're cheap (I think in some cases they're even free), and it’s easy to choose what you want to roll and roll it. No more needing to look around for which dice you want. You can even make the dice look however you want.This is nice and all, but I prefer real dice.I’ll confess that I have a couple of these apps and I use them every now and then, particularly when I go somewhere to game and f …

Unless you're playing Craps in Vegas, it's usually not necessary to calculate odds every single time you roll some dice. But it's good to have at least a general knowledge of dice odds, whether you're playing a tabletop role-playing game or a few rounds of Farkle. What is the chance of rolling a 6 on an 8-sided die? How about the chance of rolling a 10 on two 6-sided dice? Or what are the odds you'll roll a Yahtzee in a single roll of five dice? Without getting into heavy-duty s …

In many of these blog posts, I’m going to refer to the ‘70s as the dawn of modern gaming. It’s the time when war games exploded into a whole genre with massive board games and elaborate miniatures games. It’s the time when board games began experimenting on a massive scale with something other than rolling the dice and moving a figure around a square board. And most importantly, it’s when role playing games brought along a whole new dimension of gaming with various types of dice, providing mu …

My favorite die to use is a d10. The reason I like this die is because of its simplicity of math. A d6 has a 16.7% chance of getting each number, a d8 has a 12.5% chance of rolling each number, and so on. These get complex when you start figuring out what you need to roll multiple numbers on the die, and when a second die is added, it becomes exponentially complex. A d10, on the other hand, is very easy to figure out the odds based on percentages. A 1 has a 10% chance of success, a 1-3 has …