Were even the ancient humans so easily bored that ones they had food, shelter and clothing they had to start finding ways to amuse themselves?
Dice have been around a long time. Knowledge about them can be tracked down to 6000 BC. Cheating followed soon enough.
Ancient Trickery
Archaeologists have unearthed dice from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Rome dating back more than 3000 years. Some bone and ivory examples show asymmetrical carving or concealed weights. Roman writers like Cicero even complained about dishonest gamblers who used “false dice” — sometimes filled with lead or shaved to land more often on high numbers.
This is an ivory dice from 1st-3rd century CE. Copyright Public Domain
Medieval to Renaissance Cheating
Dice were the pastime of soldiers, sailors, and tavern-goers across medieval Europe. Church laws regularly banned gaming, yet it flourished — and so did cheating. Records from London mention “false dice” weighted with quicksilver (mercury), and the Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano described methods of fraud in his 16th-century treatise De Ludo Aleae (“On Games of Chance”), one of the first mathematical studies of probability.
This links to two images about medieval dices. One is an image and the other an x-ray displaying the weights inside.
Source: London Museum.
Victorian ages
By the 1800s, gambling had become a fashionable vice, and professional cheats turned it into a craft. Books such as John Nevil Maskelyne’s Sharps and Flats (1894) and John Philip Quinn’s Fools of Fortune (1890) exposed a world of “crooked” dice — some with duplicated sides, others subtly weighted or even hollowed out to hold drops of lead.
Today's scenery
In modern casinos, dice are manufactured with high tolerances, measured by lasers and handled with strict rotation schedules. Still, underground games and street craps occasionally turn up loaded dice — a timeless reminder that wherever there’s a wager, someone will try to bend the odds. And with all the online shops at our disposal owning a pair has never been easier.
If you want to dive into modern information about craps cheating here's a study from 2021.
