Story dice

How to use the story dice on this page

1. Choose how many dice. Three dice give a short story and suit beginners and young children. Six need a proper little plot. Nine is the full challenge.
2. Roll. Press the Roll button, or pick the dice up with your finger or mouse, drag them and let go over the tray. Each die tumbles with real physics and lands with one picture facing up.
3. Look at the pictures for a moment and pick one to start with. You do not have to follow the order in which they landed.
4. Tell the story out loud or in writing, using every picture that came up.
5. Roll again for a new story, or reroll as part of a game (for example, a fresh die for each player's turn).

Each of the nine dice has its own six pictures and none is repeated on another die, so a nine-dice roll never shows the same picture twice. The pictures fall into four groups: objects (a key, a clock), animals, places and actions. That mix is what pushes a story to have characters, a setting and things that happen.

Basic rules: how to play story dice

The starting rule is simple and almost every version agrees on it: roll the dice, look at what came up and tell a story that links all the images. The traditional opening is “Once upon a time…”, starting with whichever picture catches your eye first.

Playing on your own

One person rolls and tells the story. It works for practising a language, warming up before writing or simply passing the time. It helps to tell it quickly rather than hunting for the perfect plot: the first go feels awkward and it gets easier with practice.

Playing in a group

There are two common ways. In the first, someone rolls all nine dice and begins; each following player adds a section using one or more pictures, and the last player has to bring it to an end and tie up the loose threads. In the second, the dice are shared out and each player in turn rolls their own and carries the story on with what they get. You can stop once every die has been used or keep going for more rounds.

What does each picture mean?

Whatever you like. The pictures deliberately have no fixed meaning: a key can be a key, a secret or the answer to a problem; a ship can be a journey, an escape or someone's dream. If you are torn between two readings, either will do. There are no wrong answers, only stories that hang together more or less well.

With the family

At home it works well after a meal or on a long journey: an adult starts, everyone adds a sentence using one picture and you see where the story ends up. With young children, use three dice and let the adult act as a supporting narrator, recapping what has happened so far before handing over.

Ten ways to play with story dice

1. Once upon a time with 3 dice. Roll three dice and tell a short story with a beginning, a problem and an ending, one picture for each part. The best way to start.
2. All nine dice. The classic challenge: all nine pictures in a single story, opening with “Once upon a time”.
3. Story chain. Roll all nine. The first player picks a picture and starts; the next picks another and carries on from where the last one stopped, until the pictures run out. The final player finishes the story.
4. Backwards story. Pick one picture as the compulsory ending (“and that is why the clock stopped for good”) and tell the story that leads up to it with the other pictures.
5. Same roll, new genre. Tell two or three different stories from the same pictures: a horror story, a comedy, science fiction, a western or a romance. A good way to see how much tone changes a story.
6. Six-word stories. Use one or two pictures to write a complete story in exactly six words. It forces you to weigh every word.
7. Three ideas from one roll. With three dice, each player pitches three different plots without telling them in full. The aim is variety of ideas, not the best story.
8. Hero and villain. Three dice give a superhero's power and name; nine dice give the backstory, including a flaw. Roll again to create the villain and a reason for what they do.
9. Against the clock. One minute to tell a story using every picture. You can also require a particular word or tense.
10. Pair dialogue. Each player rolls one die and speaks as the character or object they rolled. The two improvise a conversation.

How many combinations? 10,077,696 different rolls

Each die has six faces and the dice are independent, so the number of possible rolls multiplies: 6 × 6 × 6 and so on, once for every die. With all nine dice that makes 6⁹ = 10,077,696 combinations of faces. On top of that, the same roll can be told in a different order: nine pictures can be arranged in 9! = 362,880 ways, each giving a different story outline.

A few more figures, worked out for fair dice:

The last row explains something you notice while playing: full rolls almost never repeat, yet it is normal for one picture or another to turn up again from one roll to the next. If you could pick any 9 of the 54 pictures freely, there would be 5,317,936,260 possible sets; spreading the pictures across dice cuts that number, but guarantees that no two pictures in a roll are ever the same.

Why story dice work for language and creativity

The dice are not a teaching method in themselves. They are a prop for an activity that has been studied properly: telling stories out loud. What education research says, read carefully:

It is worth being honest about the limits. There are small projects and studies using story dice in preschool and with children learning English as an additional language, with encouraging reports, but there are no large trials measuring the effect of the dice on their own. What is better supported is regular practice in telling and retelling stories, and the dice are a convenient way to set it up.

Classroom ideas by age

Early years (ages 3 to 5)

Three dice at most. First name the pictures (“a cat, a house, the moon”), then the teacher tells a short story with them, and finally the children retell it in their own words. Retelling is the most useful activity at this age and works best as a routine, for example every Friday.

Key Stage 1 (ages 5 to 7)

Three to six dice. Place each picture in one part of the story: opening, problem, solution. Then write three or four sentences, one per picture, using simple connectives (first, then, in the end).

Key Stage 2 (ages 7 to 11)

Nine dice and group work. Every group gets the same roll and a different genre, and the versions are compared at the end. A good moment to work on dialogue, character description and past tenses.

Secondary school

Flash fiction with a word limit, a change of narrator (the same story told by two characters), backwards stories and writing under constraints. The dice also work for short unprepared speaking practice.

Language lessons (EFL, ESL, MFL)

At beginner level, name the pictures and build simple present-tense sentences. At intermediate level, tell the story in the past, which means switching between tenses for actions and for background description. At advanced level, practise linking words, reported speech, or a story in which every picture must appear in a conditional sentence. Pairs or small groups get everyone talking far more than one round in front of the whole class.

Story dice for writers

Outside the classroom, the dice are used as an idea generator for writer's block or daily writing practice. A few practical ways to use them:

The pictures will not write the story for you, but they force you to make choices and to connect things you would never have put together, which is exactly what tends to be missing when you are stuck.

Background and practical tips

A game that started on a Rubik's Cube

The best-known commercial example of this kind of game is Rory's Story Cubes, created by Rory O'Connor, an Irish creativity trainer. He first put his pictures on the faces of a Rubik's Cube; the idea of spreading the 54 images over nine dice came from the American puzzle publisher Kadon Enterprises, which made a prototype in 2004 and launched the cubes in 2005. This page has no connection with that brand: the pictures on our dice are our own.

Tips

• Start with three dice even if you want to work up to nine. The difficulty does not grow in a straight line: more pictures means more threads to keep hold of at once.
• Do not get stuck on the literal meaning of a picture. If it does not fit, use it as a metaphor, a memory or something a character dreams about.
• Tell a quick first version and improve it afterwards. The better stories often come on the second go.
• In a group, agree a clear rule for the ending (who finishes and how many sentences they get), or the story tends never to end.
• For writing, take a screenshot or jot the pictures down before rolling again.
• With pupils, repeating the same activity over several weeks works better than switching games every day.