Meet the 60-Sided Dice Designed to End Board Game Ties Forever

We have all been there. It is board game night, the snacks are set out, and the inevitable showdown begins: who gets to take the first turn? You roll a standard die and get a four. The person next to you rolls a four. You re-roll, get a two, and somebody else rolls a two. Before you even place a single token on the board, you are caught in an endless loop of tie-breakers.

Well, math has finally come to rescue us from our petty game-night stalemates.

A Twelve-Year Battle Against the Re-Roll

Eric Harshbarger, a senior lecturer at Auburn University, spent roughly twelve years trying to solve this precise head-scratcher. The goal was simple on paper: design a set of dice for up to five players where everybody rolls at the exact same time, nobody ever ties, and everyone has a perfectly equal mathematical chance of coming out on top.

It sounds straightforward until you realize how easily probabilities collide. For over a decade, math enthusiasts wrestled with the problem. At one point, researchers even crafted 120-sided dice—some milled out of solid aluminum—just to see if high face-counts could solve the mystery.

The Magic Number Is 60

The real breakthrough arrived around 2023 when Canadian researcher Paul Meyer contacted Harshbarger with a fresh mathematical concept. By pooling their expertise, they proved that you could solve the problem completely using a set of five identical 60-sided dice.

Each die in the set of five is crafted so that no matter what combination of numbers the five players land on, no two players will ever roll the exact same value. Even cooler? The underlying mathematics proved something unexpected: dice do not strictly need an equal number of sides to guarantee fair, tie-free outcomes, though using five matching 60-sided shapes keeps the setup clean and balanced.

Go Big or Go Home

To celebrate cracking a problem twelve years in the making, Harshbarger did what any proud mathematician would do. He built massive replicas of the 60-sided dice—stretching roughly 3.5 feet in diameter—and put them on display inside Auburn's science complex.

While there is no word on whether these probability powerhouses will ever be mass-produced for tabletop gamers, having a set on your dining room table would instantly render the phrase 're-roll for ties' obsolete.

The Otterly Interesting Part

Humans have been rolling carved bones and numbered cubes for more than 5,000 years, mostly shrugging off ties as a minor annoyance of fate. It takes a unique kind of practical genius to spend over a decade deciding that rolling a tie during game night is a problem worth solving with advanced geometry.

Would you trade your classic six-sided dice for a 60-sided behemoth if it meant never arguing over turn order again?

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