Choboichi

Choboichi is a traditional Japanese gambling game played with a single six-sided die concealed under a cup or bowl. A dealer, called the dotori, shakes the covered die and sets it down without revealing the result, and the bettors, called hariko, place their stakes on one of six numbered spaces on a betting board before the cup is lifted. A correct guess of the hidden face typically pays out at four to one, though recorded variants used multipliers ranging from two to one up to five to one, and the dealer keeps every losing wager. The dealer's role could be held by a fixed operator or rotated among the players taking part. The game was popular enough in Japan by the eighteenth century that a full strip of gambling sheds roughly one ri long, about 3.75 kilometers, grew up around it. Choboichi belongs to a family of concealed-die wagering games that scale the same guess-the-hidden-face mechanic to more dice, including cho-han with two dice and cee-lo with three, with choboichi itself the simplest, single-die form.