Go First Dice

Go First Dice are a set of specially numbered dice designed so that, when rolled together, every player has an exactly equal chance of coming out first, second, third and so on, removing the bias of ordinary dice or coin flips for deciding play order. Each die in a set carries different numbers on its faces so that no two dice can tie, and mathematicians have worked out several levels of fairness: go-first-fair sets guarantee an equal chance of the top roll, while place-fair and permutation-fair sets guarantee equal chances for every possible ranking. Robert Ford found practical solutions for three six-sided dice and four twelve-sided dice around 2010, and later designers including Eric Harshbarger, James Grime, Brian Pollock and Paul Meyer extended the idea to larger groups of players. The concept reached a wider audience when writer Alex Bellos described it in The Guardian in 2012 as a clever piece of recreational mathematics applied to a common tabletop problem.