The opposite faces of an ordinary six-sided die always add up to 7.

There are "right-handed" and "left-handed" dice. In Europe and the Americas, dice are typically right-handed. This means that if the 1 is face up, and the 2 is facing you, then the 3 will be on your right:

In Asia, dice typically have the 3 on the left.

A branch of mathematics known as probability got its start in 1654, when Blaise Pascal and his friend, the Chevalier de Méré, tried to analyze a game of dice.

Dice were developed from ancient games played with sheep knucklebones, called astragali in Greek, and tali in Latin. The bones from sheep's ankles were used to tell fortunes. Called "rolling bones," they were basically rectangular and had numbers on only four sides.

A die with four faces is a tetrahedron. A die with twelve faces is a dodecahedron. A die with twenty faces is an icosahedron.