Story dice online

Each picture set holds 9 dice, and every dice carries 6 different pictures. A roll takes the chosen number of dice from the ticked sets, lays them out in a random order and turns each one to a single face. Every picture on a dice therefore has a 1 in 6 chance. Until the button is first pressed the table shows question marks, because nothing has been drawn.

Take the everyday set with all its dice. One possible roll reads Key, Child, Hamster, Steam train, Biscuit, Teddy bear, Rainbow, Guitar and Surprised. The first three pictures, Key, Child and Hamster, could open the story. Steam train, Biscuit and Teddy bear could carry the middle, and Rainbow, Guitar and Surprised could round it off. Any order works, as long as every picture finds a place.

1. Tick one or more picture sets and choose how many dice to roll, from 1 to 9.
2. Press Roll the dice. The dice land in a row with their picture names underneath.
3. Tell or write a story in which every picture appears. A tap on a picture adds a tick, and a line counts how many pictures the story has used so far.
4. Roll them all again for a fresh set, or keep some dice and roll only the others.

The picture names are on by default and can be switched off in the settings. Without them, each player decides what a picture stands for, and a smiling face can become joy, relief or a trick about to be played.

Story dice are picture dice for making up stories: in place of spots, each face shows a picture. The roller has 6 sets of 9 dice, which makes 54 pictures to a set and 324 in all. No picture appears on two dice, so a name always means one thing.

• Everyday: home, family, pets, transport, food, weather, hobbies and feelings, starting with "House", "Key" and "Door".
• Fairy tales: royalty, magic, creatures and old objects, such as "Crown", "Princess" and "Prince".
• Journeys and places: maps, landscapes, buildings, vehicles and wild animals, beginning with "Map", "Compass" and "Torch".
• Animals and nature: creatures of the woods, farm and sea, plants and the weather's forces, such as "Fox", "Bear" and "Lion".
• Space and science: rockets, planets, tools and machines, starting with "Rocket", "Flying saucer" and "Alien".
• Actions: verbs instead of things, such as "Run", "Walk" and "Swim", which tell a character what to do next.

Sets can be mixed. With fairy tales and space both ticked, the dice come from both sets, so the dragon may land beside the rocket. Nothing fixes what a picture means: the old key can open a door, a secret or a whole new chapter, and that gap is where imagination comes in.

The pictures are emoji drawn from Twemoji, an open image set licensed under CC BY 4.0. Because the page draws them itself, a roll looks the same on every phone, tablet and computer.

9 dice give one full story with a beginning, a middle and an end, which is why the roller starts with 9. A short story needs fewer. The Scottish Book Trust's guide to making a story cube suggests three cubes, one each for a setting, a character and an item.

Any number from 1 to 9 can be rolled, and each extra dice multiplies the possible rolls by 6. 9 dice can show 10,077,696 different sets of faces.

Order multiplies the count again. The 9 dice of one set, in every order and with every face, can make 3,656,994,324,480 different rows of pictures.

Story dice are played by rolling picture dice and telling a tale built on every picture shown. The roller offers three ways. With one storyteller, a single person tells one story from all the dice. With take turns, one story, 2 to 8 players build a chain story. Each takes the next dice from left to right, 1, 2 or 3 at a time, and the last turn ends it. With take turns, own stories, every player gets a fresh roll and tells a story of their own. The group decides whether a picture was used fairly and whether the story hangs together. No ministry or association decides how story dice are played, so these rules are the roller's own.

In the chain story the dice are shared out in groups, players take them in turn, and the first player comes back after the last. With 9 dice, 3 players and 3 dice each, the turns fall neatly into the story's three parts.

Other groupings leave a dice over. With 4 players and 2 dice each there are 5 turns, and picture 9 goes back to player 1, whose turn ends the story. The dice of the other turns stay dimmed, and the screen says when a turn is the last.

Turn-taking is what makes the chain version work: each player has to follow the narrative so far before adding to it. Groups that want a faster round with one phone can try the hot potato game, where players name words before a hidden countdown runs out.

Every dice has two small controls: a lock that keeps its picture and an arrow that rolls that dice alone again. While a dice is kept, the main button becomes Roll the dice not kept. The same dice stay on the table, and only the free ones show new pictures.

A single re-roll swaps a picture that will not fit the story. Roll them all again starts afresh, drawing new dice as well as new faces. With one set and 9 dice, all 9 dice of that set land every time, in a random order.

Each throw uses the browser's cryptographic random numbers, the getRandomValues method the W3C defines in its Web Cryptography specification. Any random number that would favour one face is thrown away and drawn again, a method called rejection sampling. Over many rolls, each of the 6 pictures on a dice comes up equally often.

The roller holds 32 story starters, each a first line to build on, and 26 challenges, each a condition the story has to meet. One starter reads "Once upon a time, in a town where it never stopped raining..." One challenge reads "The story ends with a surprise."

Both are optional. A new one arrives with each fresh roll or with its own button, and every line is shown once before any repeats. On paper the trio works as a writing prompt: the pictures bring the ingredients, the starter the first sentence and the challenge the twist.

The timer offers 30 seconds, 1 minute, 90 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes and 5 minutes per turn, or it can stay off. It can be started, paused, carried on and reset. At zero it shows Time is up, plays three short tones that can be switched off, and vibrates where the phone allows it. It never moves the turn on by itself, and Next turn resets it.

A told story can also be measured in words: the speech time calculator turns a word count into minutes at a chosen speaking pace.

In a primary school classroom, story dice serve oral storytelling and creative writing. The national curriculum never mentions dice, but it asks for the stories they prompt. The Department for Education's English programmes of study expect pupils in years 1 to 6 to "give well-structured descriptions, explanations and narratives for different purposes, including for expressing feelings".

In Key Stage 1 (KS1), year 1 pupils practise "saying out loud what they are going to write about" and "sequencing sentences to form short narratives". In Key Stage 2 (KS2), years 3 and 4 move on to "creating settings, characters and plot", and years 5 and 6 to "describing settings, characters and atmosphere". The spoken language strand adds "speculating, hypothesising, imagining and exploring ideas".

Education Scotland's experiences and outcomes for literacy and English set a similar aim, written in the pupil's voice. Outcome LIT 0-09b begins "I enjoy exploring events and characters in stories and other texts". It goes on: "I use what I learn to invent my own, sharing these with others in imaginative ways."

Evidence on the dice themselves is thin. A conference paper by D. Gregson of the University of Sunderland, given at ECER 2018, followed 12 reluctant writers in one North East England school for five days. It lends only qualified support to the idea that such resources raise motivation to write, and it had no control group.

For a whole class, Big screen shows the dice full screen on a projector or interactive whiteboard where the browser allows it, and otherwise fills the window. A lively retelling can get loud, and the classroom noise meter shows the room's level as a traffic light.

Printable story dice come out as one cube net per dice. Each net is the cross shape of 6 squares with 7 glue tabs and a 3.5 cm edge, and 2 fit on an A4 page. The sheet holds either the dice on the table or every dice of the ticked sets. One set fills 5 pages and all 6 fill 27, with or without the names under the pictures.

1. Print at 100 % so that each edge measures 3.5 cm.
2. Cut out each net along the solid lines.
3. Fold along the dotted lines.
4. Glue the grey tabs inside the cube.

The Rainbow Trust Children's Charity describes the same method in its Dice Stories sheet: "Cut along the straight lines, and fold the dotted. Fold the sides and glue the tabs to secure." The Scottish Book Trust's template works the other way round, with blank faces on which pupils draw pictures of their own.

Copy the roll puts the picture names, plus the starter or challenge if shown, into a short text with a link. The link keeps the settings in the address and the roll after the # sign. Browsers never send that part to a server, and whoever opens the link sees the same dice. Player names never go into the link, and nothing is saved on the device: no cookies and no local storage.

Boxed picture dice exist too. The best known, Rory's Story Cubes, were designed by Rory O'Connor, an Irish creativity trainer, and first sold in the mid 2000s. This roller has no link with that product, and its sets, pictures and rules are the site's own.

The Cambridge Dictionary gives dice as the British singular as well as the plural, marking die as US or old use. That is why this page speaks of a dice for one.