A History of Casino Games and Culture: From Ancient Dice to Live Dealers

Casino games are far older than casinos. People were throwing dice about 5,000 years ago, the Romans gambled on dice at their festivals, and playing cards, which began in medieval China, reached Europe by the 1370s. The first government-run gambling house opened in Venice in 1638, roulette took its modern form in late 18th-century Paris, and Las Vegas grew after Nevada legalized casino gambling in 1931. Since the 1990s the same games have moved online, and since the 2000s they have been dealt by real croupiers on live video.

This history follows the main games and the culture that grew around them, with a timeline of the dates that can be documented and a note on the popular stories that cannot. For the deck itself, see our companion piece on the evolution of playing cards.

Updated October 2026. Dates checked against the sources listed at the end of the page.

Casino Game History at a Glance

The Ancient World: Dice, Knucklebones and Rome

Dice probably grew out of fortune-telling with the knucklebones of hoofed animals, which land on one of four sides. Carved dice followed. Possibly the oldest known examples were excavated as part of a backgammon-like game set at Shahr-e Sukhteh, the “Burnt City” in south-eastern Iran, dated to between 2800 and 2500 BCE; bone dice from Skara Brae in Scotland are of similar age. At Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley, terracotta dice from 2500 to 1900 BCE include at least one whose opposite sides add up to seven, exactly as on a modern die.

Rome turned dice into a social habit. Romans used large four-sided tali, descended from knucklebones, and smaller six-sided tesserae. Gambling was officially frowned upon but tolerated during the Saturnalia festival in December. According to the biographer Suetonius, the emperor Augustus played dice openly for money, even in old age, and Claudius was so devoted to the game that he wrote a book about it, now lost. Julius Caesar’s words at the Rubicon in 49 BC, “the die is cast”, show how naturally dice language came to Roman leaders; our article on casino phrases you don’t know you’re using traces that and many other expressions.

The Middle Ages: A King’s Book of Games

Alfonso X of Castile, León and Galicia, known as Alfonso the Wise, commissioned the Libro de los juegos (Book of Games), completed in 1283. It runs to 97 parchment leaves with about 150 miniature paintings and is divided into three kinds of game: chess, a game of pure skill; dice, games of pure chance; and tables, the backgammon family, which mix both. Its dice section describes betting games with two and three dice that belong to the same family as later games such as hazard. Today the original manuscript is held at the monastery of El Escorial near Madrid.

Card games arrived in Europe a century later. Most likely they came through the Islamic world, where Mamluk Egypt made packs with four suits and court cards, and they appear in records across Europe from the 1370s. An often-repeated story that Marco Polo brought cards back from China has no evidence behind it.

The First Casino: Venice’s Ridotto (1638)

Italian gave us the word “casino”: it first meant a small house or pavilion used for pleasure. Gambling clubs existed in many cities, but the first state-sanctioned public gambling house opened in Venice in 1638, when the Great Council allowed a wing of the Palazzo Dandolo, near the church of San Moisè, to be used for gambling during Carnival. The Ridotto was meant to bring gambling under control and let the state profit from it.

It ran for 136 years. In 1774 the reformer Giorgio Pisani proposed closing it “to preserve the piety, sound discipline and moderate behavior” of Venetians, and the motion passed by a large majority. That tension between a regulated house that raises revenue and fears about what gambling does to people has followed casinos ever since.

Roulette, Bad Homburg and Monte Carlo

Roulette is often credited to the mathematician Blaise Pascal and his search for a perpetual motion machine, but that story is legend, and the game probably developed from earlier Italian and French wheel and board games. The first clear description of roulette with house pockets comes from Paris: Jacques Lablée’s novel La Roulette, ou le Jour describes a wheel at the Palais Royal in 1796 with “exactly two slots reserved for the bank”.

The next step was competitive. In 1843 the French brothers François and Louis Blanc, running the casino at Bad Homburg in Germany, introduced a wheel with a single zero to attract players from rivals using two. When German states moved against gambling, François Blanc took the model to Monaco. The Société des Bains de Mer was formed in 1863 to run the Monte Carlo casino, Blanc became its majority shareholder, and the architect Charles Garnier, designer of the Paris opera house, redesigned and expanded the building in 1878 and 1879. Monte Carlo spread the single-zero wheel across Europe, while the double-zero wheel traveled up the Mississippi from New Orleans and became the American standard. That split is why roulette still costs 2.70% on a European wheel and 5.26% on an American one.

Craps and Blackjack: European Games, American Rules

Craps descends from the English dice game hazard, whose origins are obscure. In aristocratic London the losing throws of two and three were nicknamed “crabs”, which became “craps”. Bernard de Marigny, a New Orleans planter, is often said to have brought hazard to the city around 1805, although some historians credit anonymous players with simplifying the game. Around 1907 a Philadelphia dicemaker, John H. Winn, added the Don’t Pass bet, which let players bet with the house and made it pointless for a casino to use crooked dice. Craps then exploded among American servicemen in the Second World War and became the signature game of post-war Las Vegas. Our guide to common craps bets explains the modern layout.

Blackjack started as twenty-one: the Spanish veintiuna described by Cervantes in 1613 and the French vingt-et-un of the 18th century. It reached America in the 19th century, took the name blackjack around the start of the 20th, and its modern rules settled in Nevada after 1931. In 1962 Edward Thorp’s book Beat the Dealer showed that card counting could beat the game, changing how casinos dealt it. Our history of blackjack covers each step.

From the Liberty Bell to the Video Slot

Coin-operated gambling machines appeared in the 1890s. A Brooklyn company, Sittman and Pitt, made a poker machine with five drums holding 50 card faces; it had no automatic payout, so bars paid prizes by hand. In San Francisco, Charles Fey built a simpler machine, the Liberty Bell, with three reels and five symbols: horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts and a Liberty Bell. Three bells paid the top prize of ten nickels, and the machine paid out automatically, which made it the model for every slot that followed.

Technology kept changing the machine. Bally’s Money Honey, launched in 1963, became the first fully electromechanical slot, with a bottomless hopper that paid up to 500 coins without an attendant. In 1976 Fortune Coin Co. built the first video slot, using a modified 19-inch Sony Trinitron screen; IGT bought the technology in 1978. Slots went on to become the largest source of casino revenue, a long way from Fey’s workshop.

Las Vegas and Casino Culture

Nevada legalized casino gambling on 19 March 1931, when Assembly Bill 98 became law. Downtown Las Vegas clubs came first; the Strip followed in the 1940s, with the Flamingo, completed under the gangster Bugsy Siegel, opening in December 1946. Over the following decades Las Vegas turned casino games into a culture of their own: headline shows, themed resorts, dress codes and superstitions, and films that made blackjack counters and high rollers into characters. Our list of blackjack movies picks out the best of them.

Casino culture also brought its own etiquette, from tipping dealers to the rules about touching chips once the cards are out, and its own vocabulary. Much of that carried over to live dealer tables online, where dealers still call “no more bets” and players still tip.

Online Casinos and Live Dealers

The internet era began in 1994. That year Antigua and Barbuda passed the Free Trade and Processing Zone Act, under which it began licensing online gambling companies, and Microgaming’s software powered The Gaming Club, widely credited as one of the first online casinos. InterCasino followed in November 1996. Early online games were software only, using random number generators. Our page on the first online casino covers those years.

Live dealer games closed the gap between the casino floor and the screen. Evolution, founded in 2006, built studios where real croupiers deal real cards and spin real wheels on video, with scanners and optical character recognition reading results into the betting software. Our explainer on how a live dealer casino works shows the technology. In the US, regulated online casinos launched in New Jersey and Delaware in November 2013, and Evolution opened its first US live studio, in Atlantic City, on 17 August 2018.

Today eight states have legalised online casinos; seven markets are live (NJ, PA, MI, WV, CT, DE, RI); Maine legalised a tribal-only market (LD 1164: became law without the governor’s signature in January 2026, effective 29 Jul 2026) that has not launched (Oct 2026). Offshore sites that accept players from other states hold no US state licence, so there is no state regulator to complain to and your funds are not protected. Whatever the era, the games carry a house edge; if gambling stops being fun, call 1-800-MY-RESET (1-800-697-3738) or visit ncpgambling.org.

Frequently asked questions

What is the oldest casino game?

Dice games are the oldest. Possibly the oldest known dice, from Shahr-e Sukhteh in Iran, date to between 2800 and 2500 BCE, and dice are ancestors of modern games such as craps and sic bo.

What was the first casino?

The Ridotto in Venice, opened in 1638 by the city’s Great Council as a state-sanctioned gambling house during Carnival. It closed in 1774.

Who invented roulette?

Nobody can be named with confidence. The Blaise Pascal story is legend; the first clear description of roulette comes from Paris in 1796, and François and Louis Blanc introduced the single-zero wheel at Bad Homburg in 1843.

When did Las Vegas become a gambling city?

Nevada legalized casino gambling on 19 March 1931 with Assembly Bill 98. Downtown clubs grew first, and the Strip developed from the 1940s, with the Flamingo opening in December 1946.

When were slot machines invented?

In the 1890s. Charles Fey’s Liberty Bell in San Francisco, with three reels and an automatic payout, became the model for later machines; the first video slot followed in 1976.

When did live dealer casinos start?

Live dealer production took off in the 2000s; Evolution, now the largest supplier, was founded in 2006. In the US, Evolution opened its first live studio in Atlantic City on 17 August 2018.