Ohio children play craps on the street in 1908.
By Rosemary Fetter
Imagine the first dice game, 2.5 million B.C., give or take a few centuries.
After a long winter, the hungry Paleolithic hunters step out into the sunlight. The leader looks around, scratches his head and turns to the group. With a shrug, he picks up a few stones and tosses them on the ground, muttering, “Odds we go north, evens we go south.”
Let’s assume they are successful. After the hunt, they toss again to determine who get the prime cuts and who has to settle for Mastodon burgers. The first roll, an appeal to the supernatural for guidance, was divination, a religious exercise. The second was plain old gambling.
Bone die used in the 1820s.
Early on, the practice of casting lots often meant the difference between finding a meal and becoming one. Primitive cultures used a variety of small objects to peer into the future, although the true ancestors of modern dice were sheep hucklebones or astragali, which had four asymmetrical sides. This meant that, with a little imagination, the prophet or shaman could interpret a different outcome at each throw.
Along with piles of small colored stones, astragali have been found in numerous archaeological sites in Europe and the Near East. Since they appear so frequently, they obviously had a practical use – perhaps a form of craps, with an early version of dice and chips.
The Mesopotamians, who lived in modern-day Iraq, created more modern dice by filing down the sheep bones into cubes and marking them with spots. The numbers on the sides usually did not add up to seven on opposite sides, like modern dice, and many different orientations have been found.
The earliest six-sided dice, with a modern configuration, were found in Iraq and date back to 3,000 B.C. By that time, the line between gambling for survival and gambling for fun had blurred. The ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans all “cast lots,” for reasons that had nothing to do with religion, as did their gods and goddesses.
The game of hazard, great-grandfather of craps, originated during the Middle Ages. As early as the 12th century, English soldiers played hazard on their way to the Holy Land during the Third Crusade. Fourteenth century author Geoffrey Chaucer mentions the game in The Canterbury Tales, both in The Cook’s Tale and the Pardoner’s Tale.
An early description of hazard comes from The Book of Games, commissioned in the late thirteenth century by Alphonso X of Castile. Alphonso’s book, which dealt with everything from chess to board and dice games, maintained that the name “hazard” was derived from the Arabic word for dice, az-zahr. According to the king, the game had spread through Europe after the eighth century Saracen invasion of the island of Corsica.
Hazard was much simpler to understand than craps. A player first rolls a number and must roll it again before his or her opponent rolls it. The caster and the setter could play against one another with fairly even odds. Both men and women enjoyed the game, popular in both France and England. Hazard became a mercantile game in 17th century England among the higher classes and nobility, and great fortunes were wagered, won and lost in London gaming houses.
Since hazard was equally popular with the English and French, the game might have come over on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims or with the French who settled New Orleans. Louisiana Frenchmen played craps, or “crabs” as they called it, the term used when the losing roll of 2 is thrown. The game was difficult to win, and in 1804, planter Bernard de Marigny suffered such severe losses that he had to sell his property. He subsequently named a street from his land, Rue de Craps.
In 1813, another Frenchman named Bernard de Manville from New Orleans developed an updated version of craps, although his game was vulnerable to cheaters because of its betting regulations. Sometime around 1840, African Americans played the next generation, which they called African dominos. Along with jazz, they can be credited with the invention of modern craps. In the new game, like today’s craps, the shooter who got a seven or eleven on his first roll automatically won. A 2, 3 or 12 meant an automatic loss. Any other roll became the point, and had to be rolled again before a seven. Gambling parlors charged a flat fee each time the shooter made two passes.
Riverboat gamblers spread craps up the Mississippi and out West, but it wasn’t that profitable for the house until a dice maker named John H. Winn, “the Father of Modern Craps,” developed the game further. With Winn’s innovations, players could bet with or against the shooter.
“Bank craps,” played on a layout that included pass, don’t pass, come, don’t come and proposition and field bets, gained popularity among soldiers in World War I and World War II, at which time it became the predominant game in Nevada. Craps remained the landmark American casino game until blackjack took the lead in the 1960s.
The dice themselves went through a long evolution, moving from wood, stones and bones to ivory, precious stones and porcelain used by the Greeks. The material for modern casino dice, hard cellulose, is transparent to protect against loading and has sharp edges and corners.
Since craps was primarily an American invention, it spread slowly to European casinos. An apocryphal story gives actor Edward G. Robinson credit for bringing the game to Monte Carlo. Robinson, who played a gangster in American movies, was attending the Cannes Film Festival when he decided to visit a casino. After losing at roulette, he supposedly grumbled, “What his joint needs is a real crap game.” The rest is history.
