Colour dice

How to use the colour dice on this page

1. Choose one or two dice. One die gives one colour; two give two colours at once, which is what some racing and colour-mixing games need.
2. Roll. Press Roll or pick the die up with your finger or mouse, drag it and let go over the tray. It tumbles with real physics and settles on one face.
3. Read the result. The colour appears in large format with its name written on it, so it is easy to see from across the room, on an interactive whiteboard or on a phone in the middle of the table.

The six faces are red, blue, green, yellow, orange and purple, one of each, and the die is symmetrical, so every colour is equally likely. Each face also carries the name of the colour. That helps children who are still learning their colours and, above all, anyone who has trouble telling colours apart, as explained in the colour blindness section below.

What a colour die is used for

Children's board games

Many games for the very young replace numbers with colours: the child does not need to count, only to recognise the colour and move the counter or take the piece of that colour. If a home-made game or a board game has lost its die, this one can stand in as long as the colours match or you agree what stands for what.

Mat games with coloured circles

The classic game of putting hands and feet on coloured circles can be played at home with sheets of card on the floor. The colour die picks the colour and a normal die picks the limb (for example 1-2 left hand, 3-4 right hand, 5 left foot, 6 right foot).

Learning colours, in other languages too

Rolling and saying the colour out loud is a simple vocabulary exercise. In Spanish, French or German lessons it is a quick way to practise colour words and then short sentences (“Veo algo rojo”, “Je cherche quelque chose de vert”).

Classroom and group activities

Board games that use a colour die

Colour dice are very common in games for toddlers and pre-schoolers because they make it possible to play before a child can count. A few well-known examples, mentioned only to describe them (this page has no connection with their publishers):

Snail's Pace Race (Ravensburger)

Published in 1985 and designed by Alex Randolph, it is called Tempo, kleine Schnecke! in Germany. It has six snails in six colours and is played with two colour dice: each turn you roll both and the snails of the colours that come up move forward; if both dice show the same colour, that snail moves two spaces. The first snail over the line wins, and players bet on which one it will be. In the classic edition the snails are red, yellow, green, pink, blue and orange, so with this die you simply agree that purple stands in for pink.

First Orchard (HABA)

Known as Erster Obstgarten in German, it is a cooperative game for children from two years old. Its die has four coloured faces (green, blue, yellow and red), a basket and a raven: a colour lets you pick a fruit of that colour, the basket lets you pick any fruit and the raven moves one step along the path. If all the fruit is gathered before the raven reaches the orchard, everyone wins. With our die you can play by agreeing that orange is the basket and purple is the raven; the odds stay the same, because each face still comes up one time in six.

Home-made racing games

Any track with coloured squares becomes a colour dice game: roll and move to the next square of the colour you got. It is the simplest way to invent a game at home and works from about three years old.

Colour dice odds

With a fair die, each colour comes up with probability 1/6 (16.7%) on every roll, and one roll does not affect the next. Red not appearing for ten rolls does not make it any more likely on the eleventh.

With one die

On average it takes 6 rolls to get a particular colour, but about one game in three it will take longer than that. Seeing all six colours at least once takes 14.7 rolls on average:

With two dice

Two dice give 36 equally likely results if you tell the dice apart, or 21 different combinations if it does not matter which is which (6 matching pairs and 15 two-colour pairs).

In the snail race described above, this means that on each turn a given snail moves at least one space with probability 11/36 and moves two spaces with probability 1/36. Every snail has exactly the same chances, so the race is pure luck.

Colour blindness: why each face has the name written on it

Around 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour blindness, according to the figures used by colour blindness charities and eye health institutes (measured mainly in people of northern European descent). It is inherited through the X chromosome, which is why it is so much more common in men. In practice it means that a mixed class usually has at least one colour blind child, often without anyone knowing.

The most common form is red-green colour blindness, but the problems are not limited to those two colours: reds, greens, oranges, browns, purples, pinks and greys can all be confused, and so can blue and purple. That is exactly the kind of palette found on a six-colour die. There is another, much rarer form in which blue and yellow are confused.

That is why every face of this die also shows the colour's name. Web accessibility guidelines ask for the same thing for the same reason: colour should never be the only way information is conveyed, and should be backed up by text, a symbol or a pattern. With the name written on, a colour blind player can join in on equal terms without having to ask what came up.

Tips for inclusive home-made games

• If you make coloured counters or squares, add a different letter, number or symbol for each colour.
• Avoid games that rely only on telling red from green, or green from orange.
• In class, do not mark as a vocabulary mistake what may be a vision issue: if a pupil always mixes up the same colours, it is worth mentioning to the family.

The colours in six languages

For anyone using the die in language lessons, here are the six colours in the languages of this site:

A quick game: roll the die, and the first person to say the colour in the language being learnt scores a point. With two dice, say both colours and make a sentence that uses them.

A linguistic curiosity

In 1969 the anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay compared the basic colour words of different languages and proposed an order: if a language has only two, they are black and white; the third is red; then come green and yellow; then blue; and later brown and colours such as orange, pink, purple and grey. Later research broadly backed the idea, though it has been refined considerably and should not be read as a strict timeline.

Colour dice games to play at home

1. Colour hunt. Roll the die and each player has thirty seconds to fetch something of that colour. For older children: three things, or one beginning with a given letter.
2. Home-made Twister. Six rows of coloured card on the floor. The colour die gives the colour; a normal die gives the hand or foot.
3. Colour race. A track of coloured squares drawn on paper. Each player rolls and moves to the next square of that colour. First to the end wins.
4. Colour mixing with two dice. The six colours on the die are the three primaries and three secondaries of the traditional painter's colour wheel: red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue make green, red and blue make purple. Roll two dice and, if two different primaries come up (one roll in six), the first to name the mixed colour wins. You can check with paints afterwards.
5. Colour by dice. A picture split into areas: roll and colour in one area with the colour you got. If there are no areas left for that colour, miss a go.
6. Sorting. A bag of coloured building bricks or pegs. Roll and take a piece of that colour out of the bag. The first to complete a row of six different colours wins.
7. Colour and number. A colour die and a normal die: “three green things”, “five jumps on the red square”. It combines vocabulary and counting.
8. Movement. Each colour is a movement (red, jump; blue, spin; green, touch your toes, and so on). Handy for brain breaks in class or on rainy days.

Background and practical tips

The painter's colour wheel

The scheme of red, yellow and blue as primary colours and orange, green and purple as secondaries is the traditional painter's colour wheel and has been taught for centuries. We now know it is not an accurate model of how pigments mix (printing uses cyan, magenta and yellow), but it is still the one taught at school and the one used in colour games for children.

A famous game with no die

The best-known game with a mat of coloured circles, Twister, came out in 1966 and uses a spinner rather than a die, with four colours (red, yellow, green and blue). To play something similar with this die, let orange and purple mean “your choice” or “roll again”.

Tips

• With two- or three-year-olds, start with one die and say the colour out loud every time. The aim is recognising it, not winning.
• If a game needs fewer than six colours, give the spare ones to “roll again” or a special action, so no turns are wasted.
• For group games, put the screen in the middle or on the whiteboard: the large name avoids arguments about what came up.
• Remember that each roll is independent. If yellow has not come up for a while, it is not “due”.