Rolling the Bones: The Real History of Viking Dice and Games of Chance

Swords and shields tend to dominate the popular image of Viking life, but the most commonly recovered gaming artifact from the Viking Age isn't a weapon at all — it's a die. Small, portable, and easy to carve from whatever bone was on hand, dice traveled everywhere the Norse did: longhouses, trading towns, ships, and graves.

What Viking Dice Were Actually Made Of

Most surviving dice from the period are carved from bone or antler — cheap, plentiful materials in an agricultural society with no shortage of livestock. Wealthier owners had dice cut from walrus ivory, a genuine luxury material traded down from Norse hunting grounds in the far north and Greenland. Excavations at major Viking-Age trading hubs — Birka in Sweden, Hedeby on the Danish-German border, and Dublin and York further afield — have all turned up dice with markings closely resembling the standard six-sided dice still used today.

A Warrior's Grave, A Handful of Dice

One of the most striking dice finds comes from Birka's grave Bj 581 — the burial long assumed to belong to a male warrior, later confirmed through genomic analysis to be a high-ranking woman. Alongside weapons, fine textiles, and the iron frame of a gaming board, the grave contained three dice and twenty-eight game pieces. Whatever this person's role in life, gaming clearly mattered enough to accompany them into the next one.

Not All Viking Dice Were Cubes

Alongside standard six-sided dice, archaeologists have also recovered "long dice" — rectangular pieces marked with just 1 and 2 on the small end faces, and 3 through 6 on the four longer sides. These appear in sets of two or three, and while their exact use isn't confirmed, some historians connect them to tabula or kvatrutafl, a backgammon-style race game that circulated through the same trade networks as Hnefatafl.

There's also a genuinely unresolved historical debate about whether Hnefatafl itself sometimes involved dice — a few saga references hint at it, though most reconstructions today treat Hnefatafl as a pure strategy game with no random element at all.

Even the Vikings Had Cheaters

Not every detail from the archaeological record is flattering. X-ray analysis of some surviving dice has revealed small weights deliberately hidden inside them to favor certain numbers — proof that loaded dice, and the impulse to cheat at games of chance, are considerably older than most people assume.

Carrying and Shaking the Dice

Dice and gaming pieces weren't just tossed loose into a bag — a set of fourteen gaming pieces recovered from a boy's grave in Balnakeil, Scotland (dated to roughly 850–900 CE), was found bundled together, suggesting some kind of pouch or container was standard practice for keeping a set together and portable. Leather, unfortunately, survives archaeology far worse than bone or antler, so direct evidence of dice cups specifically is thinner than we'd like — but the practical logic holds across gaming cultures throughout history: a cup conceals the throw, forces a proper tumble instead of a placed roll, and keeps small dice from scattering and getting lost. It's the same problem Vikings solved by bundling their pieces in Balnakeil, solved a different way.

Play With the Real Materials

We carry dice in the same materials the archaeological record points to, plus a leather cup built for exactly the shake-and-conceal function dice games have always needed:

• Viking Brass Dice (Set of 4) — heavy, balanced, and built to outlast casual use
• Bone Dice – Set of 6 — standard six-sided dice in the material most Viking Age examples were actually made from
• Viking Bone Dice Set of 5 — rectangular "long dice," styled after the archaeological finds used for tabula-style games
• Handcrafted Leather Dice Cup — hand-stitched from thick vegetable-tanned buffalo leather, available in red, green, and brown

Whether you're recreating a specific historical game or just want a genuinely old-fashioned way to settle an argument, these are built from the same materials — and solve the same problems — that Norse dice players were working with over a thousand years ago.

Frequently Asked Questions