How Ancient Cultures Used Games of Chance to Decide Things

We've written before about how a coin flip stacks up against rock paper scissors as a way to settle something fairly. What we didn't get into is where that whole instinct comes from: long before coins existed, people were already building tools whose entire job was to produce a fair, unpredictable result. Here's a short tour through the ancestors of the coin flip.

Knucklebones: the original four-sided die

Ages before anyone carved a cube, people were already rolling something close to dice: astragaloi, the ankle bones of sheep and goats. Each bone naturally lands on one of four sides, which made it a ready-made four-sided die that needed no manufacturing at all. Greeks, Egyptians, and plenty of other cultures were using them this way from at least the fifth century BC onward, for everything from children's games to serious wagering.

The Royal Game of Ur: dice with real stakes

In Mesopotamia, around 2600 BC, people played a race game now called the Royal Game of Ur using small pyramid-shaped dice, each marked on two of its four corners. Surviving cuneiform tablets show that players didn't just roll for fun; they wagered on the results. Over time the game picked up a heavier meaning too: a roll wasn't only luck, it was treated as a message, a sign of what the gods had in store for the player.

When a game piece was also an oracle

That blur between "game" and "message from above" wasn't unique to Ur. Long before dice were purely for play, throwing knucklebones was also a form of divination, a practice called astragalomancy. Someone with a question about the future, or about who was in the right during a dispute, could throw the bones and read the pattern the same way they'd read a hand of cards today. Play and decision-making weren't separate categories; a lucky roll could settle an argument just as well as it could win a game.

Odds and evens: the simplest version of all

Not every ancient decision needed dice at all. In Greece, by around 400 BC, people were playing a game called artiazein, odds and evens: one player closes a fist around a handful of small objects, often knucklebones, and the other guesses whether the count inside is odd or even. No board, no equipment beyond whatever pebbles were on hand. It's essentially a coin flip with your fist standing in for the coin, and its roots trace back even further, to similar finger games depicted in Egyptian art from around 2000 BC.

Not everyone left it to chance, either — plenty of ancient cultures preferred a board and real strategy over a roll of the bones.

The need never went away

Every one of these, bones, dice, a closed fist, exists to answer the same question: who goes first, who gets the last piece, who's right when nobody can agree. Rock paper scissors is really just the latest, most portable version of that same need, no ankle bones or dice cup required. Play a fair, instant round online the next time you and a friend can't agree on who decides.