This game was played in taverns as well as gambling houses, brothels and on the street. The emperor Commodus was fond of gambling with dice, and once turned the Imperial Palace into a brothel and gambling house to raise money for the treasury he bankrupted. In this he may have followed a precedent set by the mad emperor Caligula.

 The game of dice could be played with other pieces, such as knucklebones, or Senet sticks, which would be tossed in the same way. The Romans, in fact, played a variety of games of chance for the purpose of gambling. Coin tossing was known as capita aut navia, which means "heads or ships," (early Roman coins always had a ship on the tail side). These games were often played in the streets.

The wall drawing shown at right comes from a tavern in Pompeii. The image was redrawn from Gusman's Pompeii, the City, its Life and Art. Treatments were provided by the author. The Latin captions read 'Exsi' & 'Non tria dvas est,' in the first frame. In the second they appeared to read 'Noxsii amii tria iigo fui,' then 'Urtii. Piillatorii hgo tui,' and the barkeeper says 'Itis foras rixsatis.' This Latin is charmingly slang-like and was probably all cliches to the Romans. Below at the left is provided an English equivalent colloquialized by the author.

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Bell and others considered this to represent Duodecim Scripta, and 'exsi' makes sense in this regard. However, how a two can be rolled with three dice has never been explained by anyone, but then, one should not underestimate the Roman sense of humor. Below is shown the first panel of the above painting from Pompeii.

 In the tile mosaic below, we see two Romans from North Africa playing at dice on a table suspended across their knees.There are clearly three dice on the table, which is suspended across their knees while they sit, similar to the other pictures below. There appear to be chips on the table also but an absence of any lines or apparent words suggests this may not Tabula but Tesserae. Both games are played on a table and so playing either Tesserae or Tabula could be considered "playing at tables," or gambling.

Gambling became such an obsession for some Romans, and such a social problem in general, that the government was forced to restrict it. This was indeed unusual for the Romans, as they rarely restricted any type of civil or business activity. The Republic restricted gambling to the week-long festivities surrounding the Saturnalia (the modern Christmas & New Year's holidays).

 Under Roman Law, games of chance played for money were forbidden under the penalty of a fine fixed at four times the value of the stakes. We can imagine how effective this must have been. It probably caused most gaming tables to simply be moved indoors to so-called private clubs. Furthermore, gambling chips would have replaced actual money in the games. Considerable evidence for this exists in the large number of marked gambling chips that have been found throughout the Roman Empire, examples of which are shown here.

These chips, called roundels, are generally made of bone and carrying numerical markings on one side. The most common markings are X, V and I, with only a small proportion marked with other numbers such as II, III, VIII, IX, or other numbers up to 18. Many of the chips marked with an X have an extra vertical line through the middle, which symbolizes a denarii, or a Roman coin. Some of the chips are even labeled remittam libenter ('I will gladly repay'), as in the image at left. This is the Roman equivalent of I.O.U. and, presumably, the repayment would have been made to or from the tavern or gambling club, much the same as is done with gambling tokens in Las Vegas today. These chips bear a great similarity to those colored roundels that would have been used for other board games, such as Tabula. This should not be surprising since they were made by the same process, turning and grinding sections of bone on a lathe. Certainly, many of these gaming pieces could have served dual purposes.

Betting on horse races and gladiatorial combat was never restricted and this left the gamers some leeway in satisfying their gambling habits legally. In the later Empire it seems enforcement was spotty or neglected altogether, since even the emperors would gamble. Augustus Caesar regularly played dice or knucklebones with his family in the Imperial Palace, giving them handfuls of coins to start with.

In one epigram, Martial describes how a lesser number of dice were used than knucklebones, although apparently the stakes played for in dice were higher:

Non sim talorum numero par tessera, dum sit maior quam talis alea saepe mihi.

Which translates as the following, anthropomorphising from the point of view of the dice:

Let us dice be not equal in number to the knucklebones, if only our stakes be often greater than with the knucklebones.

In another epigram, Martial describes the joy of the Saturnalia, the Christmas/New Year's precursor holidays during which gambling was legally permitted, and the pilleum, or cap of liberty and licence was worn:

Unctis falciferi senis diebus, regnator quibus inperat fritillus, versu ludere non laborioso permittis, puto, pilleata Roma.

Which translates as the following:

On the old Scyth-bearer's feastful days, wherein the dice-box is king and lord, you allow me, I wot, cap-clad Rome, to trifle in verse untoilsome.

The dice shown in the photo below are made from ivory and come from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. They date from between the 1st century BC and the 4th century AD, during the Roman era. These dice are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Aristotle, in the Nichomachean Ethics, describes the moral distinction between wicked rulers who sack cities and other types of greedy people:

But the dicer and the footpad or brigand are to be classed as mean, as showing sordid greed, for both ply their trade and endure reproach for gain, the robber risking his life for plunder, and the dicer making gain out of friends, to whom one ought to give; hence both are guilty of sordid greed, trying to get gain from the wrong sources.

Ammianus Marcellinus, writing in the latter part of the 4th century, describes how some aleatores (gamblers) who perhaps played Tabula or Duodecim Scriptorum, distinguished themselves by their game-playing skill from mere dice-players, who depended on luck alone:

Some of these (veterans), though few in number, shrink from the name of gamblers (aleatores), and therefore desire to be called rather tesserarii, persons who differ from each other only as much as thieves do from brigands. But this must be admitted, that while all friendships at Rome are lukewarm, those alone which are formed at the gambling table, as if they were gained by glorious toil, have a bond of union and are united by complete firmness of exceeding affection; whence some members of these companies are found to be so harmonious that you would take them for the brothers Quintilius. And so you may see a man of low station, who is skilled in the arts of dice-playing, walking abroad like Porcius Cato after his unexpected and unlooked-for defeat for the praetorship, with a set expression of dignity and sorrow because at some great banquet or assemblage a former proconsul was given a higher place of honor.

Sidonius makes reference in a poem to the inventor of dice, Palamedes:

"Then you would bring out the shapely balls and hoops or the dice which with rattling fritillis marshal us for the hurtling throw, and like Nauplius' son, inventor of the art, you would exult in the raising of a merry quarrel."