If you would rather stay off screens, there are offline substitutes (paper slips, playing cards, a spinner), but most advice about them leaves out that several of them do not produce the same odds as a die. Below is the fast answer, the offline options done properly, and a reference table of how many dice your game needs, so you know what you are replacing.
On this page
The fastest fix: roll them here
The online dice roller on this site is free, has no account and no install, and works in any browser on a phone, tablet, laptop or Chromebook. Set the number of dice you need, tap ROLL (or press the space bar), and the dice tumble and settle in 3D the way they would on the table. You can roll up to twelve at once, change any single die to a d2, d3, d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, percentile die or Fudge die with the pencil button, give each die its own color so you can tell your dice from someone else's, and tap a die to hold it between rolls.
Two small things make it work well at the table. First, put the phone or laptop face up in the middle of the table instead of passing it around: everyone sees the same roll at the same moment, just as with a physical die. Second, if you are playing in a living room, the free Android app casts the same dice to a Chromecast, Android TV or Google TV, so the roll happens on the television and the phone stays in your hand as the remote. That is a better game night than passing a screen around.
Straight to the right table. The links in the tables below open the roller with the right number of dice already set up, so you do not have to configure anything before your first roll.
Offline substitutes, done properly
Every one of these can stand in for a die, but only if it keeps the property that makes a die a die: a die has no memory. Every roll is independent, and every face stays a 1-in-6 chance no matter what came before. Some substitutes break that, and it changes the game.
Paper slips in a cup
Tear six equal slips of paper, write 1 through 6, fold them the same way, and shake them in a cup or a mug. Draw one and read it. To make this fair, put the slip back and shake again before every draw. If you keep drawing without replacing, you are dealing out a fixed sequence instead of rolling a die: once the 4 is out, a 4 cannot come up again, and the final "roll" of the round is whatever is left in the cup. That is a different distribution from a die, and a more predictable one, which matters in any game where a player can count what has already gone.
If your game needs two dice, the same trap gets worse. Pulling two slips out of one cup can never give you a double, because there is only one slip of each number, and doubles matter a great deal in Monopoly, backgammon and craps. Use two separate cups of six slips, or draw, write the number down, put the slip back, shake, and draw again.
Playing cards, ace through six
Take the ace through the six of one suit, shuffle those six cards, and turn one over. The ace counts as 1. This is the quickest substitute to set up because there is nothing to write, and it is easy to keep the cards square in a small pile. The replacement rule is identical: return the card and reshuffle after every draw. For two dice, use two suits kept in separate piles, so a double is still possible.
A deck also gives you bigger dice. Ace through ten of one suit, drawn and replaced, behaves like a d10, with the ten counting as zero. Two such piles, one nominated as the tens and one as the units, stand in for a pair of percentile dice.
A spinner
A spinner is equivalent to a die as long as the sectors are equal. Six sectors of 60 degrees each, a pointer that turns freely on a low-friction pivot, and a good hard flick, and every result is as likely as any other. Where it goes wrong is in the making: a spinner drawn by eye tends to have one wide sector and one narrow one, and a paperclip on a pencil tip catches on the paper and stops early. If you make one, measure the sectors with a protractor and spin it hard enough that it turns several full times.
Three coin flips
Three coins give you eight equally likely outcomes, which is two too many for a die, but you can throw the extras away. Write out the eight combinations, assign six of them to 1 through 6, and re-flip whenever one of the other two comes up. That is fair. What is not fair is adding up heads: two heads out of three can happen three different ways and three heads only one, so the totals are lopsided before you start.
Why does fairness matter? A lot of dice games depend on odds that only hold if each roll is independent. For instance, 7 is the most common total on two dice because six of the thirty-six combinations add up to it. Change how the numbers are produced and you change the game. The dice probability page walks through those numbers.
How many dice does your game need?
Before you improvise anything, check how many dice you are replacing, and of what kind. Games we have written rules for are in the first table. A few other classics that people often look for follow underneath.
| Game | Dice | Rules |
|---|---|---|
| Yahtzee | 5 | Yahtzee rules |
| Farkle (10,000) | 6 | Farkle rules |
| Liar's Dice | 5 per player | Liar's Dice rules |
| Craps | 2 | Craps rules |
| Shut the Box | 2 | Shut the Box rules |
| Poker Dice | 5 | Poker Dice rules |
| Bunco | 3 per table | Bunco rules |
| Pig | 1 | Pig rules |
| Ship, Captain & Crew | 5 | Ship, Captain & Crew rules |
| Cee-lo | 3 | Cee-lo rules |
| Chicago | 2 | Chicago rules |
| Going to Boston | 3 | Going to Boston rules |
| Drop Dead | 5 | Drop Dead rules |
| Mia | 2 | Mia rules |
| Pickomino | 8 | Pickomino rules |
| Qwixx | 6 | Qwixx rules |
Two of those are not plain six-sided dice. Pickomino replaces the 6 with a worm, and Qwixx needs two white dice plus four in matching colors, one per row of the score sheet. This roller can give each die its own color, so the Qwixx set is reproducible, but it cannot print words, letters or pictures on a face, so a game built on custom faces, such as the Catan Dice Game with its resource symbols or a Left-Center-Right set, needs its own dice and cannot be substituted here.
| Game | Dice | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Monopoly | 2 | Ordinary six-sided dice. Monopoly Junior uses just one. Standard sets have also included an extra, specially marked red "Speed Die" since 2008. It is optional, and because it is not a plain d6 you cannot substitute it here. |
| Risk | 5 | Five dice in the box in two colors. In the current rules the attacker rolls up to three and the defender up to two. Editions differ on this (some versions let the defender roll three), so check the rulebook that came with your copy. Recolor three of the five with the pencil button to keep attack and defense apart. |
| Backgammon | 2 per player | Each player has their own pair and, traditionally, their own cup. The doubling cube is not a die. It is a marker showing the current stake, so you don't need to roll it. |
| Trouble | 1 | Sealed inside the Pop-O-Matic bubble, which is why it never goes missing, and why you cannot borrow a die from this box. |
| Ludo | 1 | One die, and a 6 gets you out of home and earns another roll. |
| Parcheesi | 2 | Two dice per turn, unlike its one-die cousin Ludo. The Indian ancestor Pachisi was played with cowrie shells rather than dice. |
If you only lost one die
Losing one die out of a pair is the most common version of this problem, and the answer is simple: roll the surviving die twice and read the two results as the first and second die. Decide the order before you roll, not after. This is equivalent to rolling two dice at once, including doubles, which the paper-slip method cannot give you. It costs you a couple of seconds a turn.
Where it needs care is any game that treats its dice differently. In Qwixx the white pair and the four colors mean different things; in Risk the attacker's dice and the defender's are compared in order. Announce which die you are rolling for before each throw and the trick still works.
The other option is another game box. A Yahtzee box holds five identical six-sided dice, a Risk box holds five, and a Farkle set holds six. Any of them can lend a die to Monopoly. If nothing turns up, roll the missing one on screen alongside your real dice; mixing a physical die and a virtual one at the same table works fine, because both are fair.
And if you decide the dice are gone for good, a replacement set is cheap. You may find you don't need one once the roll is on the television. There is more about the different shapes and sizes on the types of dice page, and a whole list of things to play on the dice games overview.
Frequently asked questions
Is a dice roller as random as real dice?
For a board game, yes. This roller picks each face with the browser's built-in random number generator. That is a pseudorandom algorithm rather than a cryptographic one, but its output is even enough that nobody at your table could tell the difference over an evening of play. A physical die is not perfectly fair either: ordinary dice have their pips drilled out, which leaves the pipped faces a fraction lighter, and casinos fill their pips with a material of the same density precisely to remove that imbalance. Both effects are far too small to change how your game plays out.
Can I use a phone as dice for a board game?
Yes, and it is the most practical substitute there is. Open this page on any phone, set the number of dice your game needs, and either pass the phone around or leave it face up in the middle of the table so everyone can see the result. You can roll up to twelve dice at once and give each one its own type and color. If passing a phone around feels awkward, the free Android app casts the same dice to a Chromecast or Google TV, so the whole table watches the roll on the television instead.