“Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” A searing image, right? But fiddles would not exist until a thousand years later. Written history celebrates the victors, of course, obscuring some facts while embellishing others.

The bone yards of archeology show what has happened, while that which hasn't, or that which was lost, slips into oblivion. Is that fate? Games of chance are tempting, often delving into a throw of the dice. From before history, bits of bone or ivory have been carefully worked so that chance might tumble freely, not tending in any particular direction. (And suddenly Og laughed!)

Casino dice are drilled with holes that get inserted with colored slugs of like material. They all go together. Then the faces are polished smooth. This expensive process guarantees all sides are of equal weight.

Games for home use are supplied with molded dice, made by plastic injection. The mold is a steel or aluminum structure with two halves. Dots on a die, pips, are extrusions on the mold that leave indentations. The molded die is painted. The paint dries. The painted die goes into a tumbler that works like a rock polisher, removing paint from the surfaces, but leaving the pips filled. The process is repeated, to remove any scratches, using a finer abrasive. When finished, the die has slightly rounded edges. Which side will come up is slightly skewed. Theory and practice are sometimes at odds – and the six-pip side is slightly lighter. The effects are negligible for an average home, being detectable only after statistical analysis of a large number of throws.

Dice have not always been like the ones we use now. Archeologists have found interesting variants, such as a fourteen-sided die comprising two groups, marked from one to six, with two faces left unmarked. Maybe there are other kinds still buried.

Imagine our prehistoric genius, unable to find easy-to-carve bone or ivory. Undeterred, he proceeds to get an ordinary rock with sharp and disorderly protuberances. Getting another and harder one, he grinds the points flat. It will tumble now, and will come to rest on any flat side. But it has more than six flats, and Og eventually finds that each one comes up once every six throws. He is already besieged with more unexplainable things than he cares to deal with. The pursuit of randomness requires regularity.

“Ha!” He further simplifies his design with more grinding until only six faces are left . . .

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