Dice yes or no: online decision dice and yes no roller

How to use the yes or no dice on this page

In short

Is the yes or no dice 50/50? Yes. In the classic mode it has three YES faces and three NO faces, and because the die is symmetrical every face is equally likely. YES and NO each have exactly a 50% chance on every roll.

The die loads in the classic setup: three faces showing YES and three showing NO. There are two ways to throw it: press the Roll button, or pick the die up with your finger or mouse, drag it and release it over the tray. It tumbles with real physics, and whichever face ends up on top is your answer.

There are three modes:

Yes or no

Three YES faces and three NO faces. Each answer has a 50% chance.

Yes, no or maybe

Two YES, two NO and two MAYBE. Each answer comes up one time in three.

Decision dice

You type your own options, up to six (say pizza, curry, fish and chips), and the die spreads them across its faces.

Before you roll, phrase the question so it can be answered with a yes or a no. "Shall I go for a run this evening?" works; "What shall I do this evening?" doesn't, and that is what the custom options mode is for. Also decide beforehand whether you will actually follow the result or just want to see how you feel when you read it. Further down we explain why both approaches are useful.

What a decision die is good for

Everyday closed questions

This is the most common use: small decisions where both options are reasonable and thinking about it longer adds nothing. Shall I have pudding? Another episode? Cycle or take the bus? When either outcome is fine, letting chance decide saves time and arguments.

Choosing between several options

With the decision dice you type in the real alternatives: what to have for tea, which film to watch, which park to visit on Sunday, which job on the list to tackle first. If you prefer one option, put it on more faces and it will come up more often.

Games and group activities

It settles who goes first in a game, who does the washing up, who picks the music in the car or which forfeit comes next in a dare game. In workshops and team activities it is handy for handing out turns or topics without anyone feeling the facilitator has favourites.

In the classroom

For teachers it is a quick way to choose who answers, which exercise gets marked or whether an activity is done in pairs or groups. It is also ready-made material for teaching probability: pupils can roll the die 30 or 50 times, record the results and compare their frequency with the theoretical 50%. With few rolls the gap is usually large, and with many it narrows, which is the law of large numbers in action.

Why leaving it to chance helps you decide

The coin-toss trick

The Danish mathematician and poet Piet Hein wrote a short poem, one of the pieces he called grooks, titled A Psychological Tip. Its idea is simple: when you cannot make up your mind, toss a coin. Not because the coin knows the answer, but because while it is in the air, or the moment you see the result, you suddenly realise which side you were hoping for.

The die works the same way. If it lands on NO and you feel relieved, you know what you wanted. If it lands on YES and your first thought is "best of three", that is an answer too. Seen like this, the die does not decide for you: it makes you imagine for a moment that the decision has already been made, and shows you how that feels.

Steven Levitt's experiment (2016)

The economist Steven Levitt, of the University of Chicago and co-author of Freakonomics, turned the idea into a real experiment. On a website set up for the study, people who had been stuck on a decision for a while described their dilemma and tossed a virtual coin: heads meant making the change (quitting a job, ending a relationship, starting a diet) and tails meant staying put. Over a year, more than 20,000 coins were tossed. Participants were surveyed again two and six months later about what they had done and how they felt.

The findings, released as an NBER working paper in 2016 and later published in the Review of Economic Studies:

People whose coin said "change" made the change more often: roughly 25% more than those whose coin said "stay".
For important decisions, such as quitting a job, those who made the change reported being substantially happier six months on.
The coin only influenced decisions made in the first two months; later changes bore no relation to the result.

Levitt's reading was that people tend to be overly cautious about big changes. He also points out the limits: participants signed up themselves, they are not a representative sample of the population, and happiness was measured by what they reported. It is an interesting finding, not a recipe for making life decisions on the flip of a coin.

Yes or no dice odds

The die is a symmetrical cube, so every face has the same chance, 1/6. What changes between modes is how many faces carry each answer.

Mode	Faces per answer	Chance of each answer
Yes or no	3 YES, 3 NO	3/6 = 1/2 = 50%
Yes, no or maybe	2 YES, 2 NO, 2 MAYBE	2/6 = 1/3 ≈ 33.3%
2 custom options	3 faces each	50%
3 custom options	2 faces each	33.3%
6 custom options	1 face each	1/6 ≈ 16.7%

Several yeses in a row

Each roll is independent: the die has no memory of what came before. So the chance of a streak is found by multiplying. Three yeses in a row in the classic mode is 1/2 × 1/2 × 1/2 = 1/8, or 12.5%: it happens about one time in eight.

Same answer in a row	Yes or no mode	Maybe mode
1 time	1/2 (50%)	1/3 (33.3%)
2 times	1/4 (25%)	1/9 (11.1%)
3 times	1/8 (12.5%)	1/27 (3.7%)
4 times	1/16 (6.25%)	1/81 (1.2%)
5 times	1/32 (3.1%)	1/243 (0.4%)
6 times	1/64 (1.6%)	1/729 (0.14%)

One detail to bear in mind: the table refers to a specific answer (three YESes, for example). If what catches your eye is getting the same result three times running, whether YES or NO, the chance rises to 1/4. And in a run of ten rolls, at least one streak of three identical results turns up 82.6% of the time. Streaks are far more ordinary than they look.

How many yeses in 5 rolls

Number of YES	Combinations (out of 32)	Chance
0	1	3.1%
1	5	15.6%
2	10	31.3%
3	10	31.3%
4	5	15.6%
5	1	3.1%

If you play best of five, the contest is settled on the third roll 25% of the time, on the fourth 37.5% and on the fifth the remaining 37.5%. In best of three, half the time two rolls are enough.

If you type your own options

Six faces only divide evenly between 2, 3 or 6 options. With 4 or 5 options there is no way for all of them to take up the same number of faces, so check what is on each face: an option that appears on two faces is twice as likely (2/6) as one that appears on a single face (1/6). For an exact split, use 2, 3 or 6 options, or repeat one on purpose to give it more weight.

Casting lots: a very old habit

Settling something by leaving it to chance is as old as dice. The practice of casting lots with objects that fall unpredictably is called cleromancy, and for centuries it was used both to share things out fairly and to put questions to the gods.

Knucklebones

Before cubic dice there were knucklebones, or astragali: small ankle bones from sheep, goats or calves. A knucklebone can land on four sides, two broad and two narrow, and the Greeks and Romans gave them the values 1, 3, 4 and 6. They were used for games and also to consult oracles: in towns of southern Asia Minor, in present-day Turkey, Roman-era stone blocks have been found carved with lists of answers. The inquirer threw five knucklebones and looked up the text that matched the throw.

In 2026 a study was published of a new block of this kind found at Kibyra, in south-western Turkey, with 56 answers about travel, trade, illness or lawsuits; some encouraged action and others advised patience. The number is no accident: with five bones of four possible values, ignoring order, there are exactly 56 different combinations.

Lots in ancient texts

The Bible mentions casting lots several times. In the Book of Jonah the sailors cast lots to find out who is to blame for the storm, and in the Acts of the Apostles Matthias is chosen by lot from two candidates to take Judas's place. The Romans called these lots sortes, and the historian Tacitus describes how Germanic peoples cut a branch into marked pieces, scattered them on a white cloth and picked three at random to interpret.

The Latin word for the dice game was alea, as in "alea iacta est" ("the die is cast"), which, according to the historian Suetonius, Julius Caesar said as he crossed the Rubicon. English "aleatory" comes from the same root.

The yes or no dice has nothing to do with fortune-telling: the result is pure chance and knows nothing about your future. What it keeps from those old customs is the underlying idea: when two options weigh the same, letting something outside you decide avoids arguments and deadlock.

The Magic 8 Ball, its best-known relative

The best-known object for yes or no questions is the Magic 8 Ball, now made by Mattel. Inside, it has exactly what this page has: a die.

The ball holds a dark blue liquid in which an icosahedron floats, a 20-sided die with an answer in raised letters on each face. When you turn the ball over, one face presses against the window and you read the answer.
Of the 20 answers, 10 are positive, 5 are non-committal (along the lines of "ask again later") and 5 are negative. So some form of "yes" comes up 50% of the time, "no" 25% and a dodge 25%.
It was invented by Albert C. Carter in Cincinnati, the son of a clairvoyant who used a spirit-writing device, and developed by Abe Bookman at the company Alabe Crafts. Carter died before the patent was granted in 1948.
The pool-ball look arrived in 1950, when the billiard-table maker Brunswick commissioned it as a promotional giveaway. It later passed through Ideal Toys and Tyco before ending up with Mattel.
To see all 20 different answers at least once takes, on average, about 72 questions.

The difference from a yes or no die is that the ball leans towards yes: two answers in four are positive and only one is negative. The classic mode of this die is symmetrical, and the maybe mode is closer to the ball, though with the same chance for all three answers.

Ideas for questions and decision dice

Yes or no questions

Shall we get a takeaway tonight?
Go for a run today or tomorrow? (yes = today)
Start the new book or finish the one I'm halfway through? (yes = start)
Shall I do the most tedious task first?
Shall we go to the seaside even though it's cloudy?

Decision dice with your own options

What's for tea?

Pizza, salad, omelette, sushi, pasta, leftovers.

Who goes first?

Type each player's name (up to six) and roll once.

Household chores

Washing up, taking the bins out, putting a wash on; everyone rolls and does whatever comes up.

Dares

Sing a chorus, tell a joke, do ten squats, impersonate someone in the group, say a tongue-twister, pass.

Weekend plans

Cinema, a walk, board games at home, visiting someone, a museum, a surprise.

In class

Reading aloud, an exercise on the board, pair work, a quick-fire question.

With three options the split is exact (two faces each). If you add "Maybe", "Roll again" or "Someone else picks" as an option, the die can hand the decision back to you as well.

Tips for using the die sensibly

Set the rules before rolling

Decide what each face means and whether the result is binding or just a nudge. Changing the rules after seeing the result spoils the point.

One question, one roll

If you keep rolling until you get what you wanted, you had already decided. In that case you don't need the die: trust yourself.

If Maybe comes up,

You can roll again, but you can also read it for what it is: a sign that the question is not well framed yet or that you are missing information.

For turns and sharing out jobs,

Roll in front of everyone. A draw people can see is accepted more easily than one carried out by a single person.

For serious decisions

(health, money, work, relationships), use it only with the coin-toss technique: roll, notice how you feel about the result, then decide calmly with whatever information you need.

Don't look for patterns

Three NOs in a row do not mean the die is "against you" or that a YES is now due. Every roll starts from scratch.

Frequently asked questions

Is the yes or no dice 50/50?

Yes. In the classic mode it has three YES faces and three NO faces, and because the die is symmetrical every face is equally likely. YES and NO each have exactly a 50% chance on every roll.

Can I add my own options?

Yes. In decision dice mode you type up to six options and the die places them on its faces. With 2, 3 or 6 options they are all equally likely; with 4 or 5, some will take up more faces than others and come up more often.

Is it any use for important decisions?

Not as a substitute for thinking. What does work with serious decisions is the coin-toss trick: roll, notice whether the result relieves or disappoints you, and use that reaction as a clue to what you really want. The final decision should be made calmly and with proper information.

What are the odds of three yeses in a row?

In yes or no mode, 1/8, which is 12.5%. In Maybe mode, 1/27, about 3.7%. Each roll is independent, so the probabilities multiply.

What does it mean if Maybe comes up?

Nothing more than that: the die has two Maybe faces, so it comes up one time in three. You can roll again or take it as a sign that you need more information before deciding.

Is it fairer than tossing a coin?

The two are practically equivalent. A University of Amsterdam study of more than 350,000 real coin tosses found that a coin lands with the same side up that it started on about 50.8% of the time, a tiny difference. The six-sided virtual die has no such hand bias.

Why do I keep getting the same answer?

Because streaks are normal. Getting the same result three times running, whether YES or NO, has a 1 in 4 chance, and in ten rolls at least one streak of three identical results appears more than 80% of the time.

How is it different from a Magic 8 Ball?

The Magic 8 Ball contains a 20-sided die with 10 positive answers, 5 non-committal and 5 negative, so it leans towards yes. The classic mode of this die is symmetrical: half the faces say YES and the other half NO.

Can I use it in class or on my phone?

Yes. The die works in the browser on a phone, tablet or computer, and you roll it with the button or by dragging it with your finger. In class it is useful for choosing turns and for probability experiments, comparing results with the theoretical 50%.