What is dice in medieval times?

Answer 1

Dice was a very popular and commonly-played gambling activity, from the lowest peasants to royalty.

Dice were small cubes of bone, stone, ivory, jet or wood, with bone being the most common material. Each side was marked with incised dots representing the numbers from 1 to 6, but not always in the same pattern as on modern dice (16 variant formats of the numbering pattern have been identified).

The rules of the game probably varied just as much as the dice and we do not have any surviving set of rules.

We do know that many dice were "loaded", with lead pieces inset under the dots on one face (often the 6) - the dots were then filled in with pigment which hid these pieces of lead. The result was that throwing a 6 was virtually impossible and such dice were used to cheat gullible people out of their money. Travelling fraudsters must have made a reasonably good income in this way.