A short history of casino games
People have been rolling, drawing and spinning for a very long time. Here is where the games behind our little arcade actually came from — kept to what the historical record supports.
Dice came first, by millennia
Long before standardized cubes, people cast astragali — the ankle bones of sheep and goats, which land on one of four faces — for games and divination across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Six-sided dice recognisably like ours appear at Bronze Age sites in the Indus Valley and the Middle East, thousands of years before the first casino opened its doors. The impulse to formalize chance is genuinely old.
Keno's roots run through imperial China
The direct ancestor of keno is a Chinese lottery often called baige piao — "white pigeon ticket" — in which players marked characters drawn from the Thousand Character Classic, a famous text used the way we use numbers. The game was well established in Guangdong by the nineteenth century, and Chinese migrants carried it across the Pacific during that century's labour migrations, including to North America. Western operators later swapped the characters for numerals, and the 80-spot board played today — the same board as our Nebula Keno — took shape.
Roulette: a French wheel with a scientific cousin
Roulette emerged in France in the late eighteenth century, and the earliest detailed descriptions of the modern game come from Paris around that time. A popular story connects the wheel to Blaise Pascal's seventeenth-century experiments with perpetual-motion devices; his rotating apparatus may have inspired the hardware, though he was not designing a game. The single-zero wheel that defines European roulette was popularized in the 1840s by the casino operators François and Louis Blanc, whose Bad Homburg house used it to undercut rivals running double-zero wheels — less edge for the house, more players through the door.
Playing cards travelled the whole Old World
Card games are documented in China by the Tang and Song dynasties, roughly a thousand years ago. Cards reached Europe in the late fourteenth century, most likely through trade with the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, whose elegant suited decks survive in fragments today. European printers then localized the suits repeatedly — the hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs standard in Canada are the French pattern, which won out largely because it was cheap to print in two colours.
The slot machine started in a San Francisco workshop
In the 1890s, a Bavarian-born mechanic named Charles August Fey built coin machines in San Francisco, and his Liberty Bell — three spinning reels, a single payline, automatic payouts — set the template every slot since has followed. Its symbols included horseshoes, stars, card suits and the cracked bell that gave the machine its name. Fruit symbols arrived soon after on machines that paid out chewing gum and sweets, which is why cherries and melons still feel like slot iconography a century later. Our Reef Reels swaps the fruit for shells and seahorses, but Fey would recognise the machine instantly.
Wheels of fortune, the carnival branch
Upright prize wheels — the "big six" or money wheel of midways and casino floors — descend from carnival games of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rather than from roulette. The format barely changed on the way indoors: equal-width segments, a pointer, a flapper clicking past pegs. Our Lantern Wheel keeps that carnival directness and posts its segment counts right on the page, which the midway operators of old were rather less keen to do.
One thread ties all of these together: every era rebuilt its games around whatever was at hand — bones, woodblock printing, clockwork, and now the random number generator in your browser. The mechanics evolved; the pleasure of watching chance resolve has not moved an inch.