We show you the dice before we roll them.

Here is the awkward bit about any dice game on a phone: the dice are not in your hand. They are rolled on our machines, out of sight. Nothing on the screen can tell you whether the number you got was the real one, or one we picked because it made a better story.

So we tie our own hands, in public, before the day starts — and then we show our working afterwards.

Why a fingerprint is enough

A fingerprint here works the way a fingerprint does on a person. It is a short jumble of letters and numbers made from something much bigger, and two things are true of it: the same secret always makes the same fingerprint, and you cannot work backwards from the fingerprint to the secret.

That second part is what makes posting it early safe. If the fingerprint gave the numbers away, everyone would know their rolls in advance and the game would be pointless. It does not, so we can commit to the numbers in public without spoiling them.

And the first part is what makes it a promise. Change one digit of the secret and the fingerprint comes out completely different — not slightly different, completely. There is no way to cook up a different set of numbers that happens to leave the same mark.

The friendly games help whoever is behind. The rated ones never do.

This is the part most games would not tell you, so we are telling you first, in the same place we make the promise above.

Tactical Race and Team Relay are rated, and their dice are plain. Every face is equally likely, every roll, for every player, whoever is winning. Nothing on this page has an asterisk when it comes to those two. A rating you climb is only worth having if the dice that decided it were not helping anybody, so they do not.

Classic Race, Blitz, Shifting Board and Knockout Party are for fun, and they lean toward whoever is behind. The further back your token is, the more often you will roll a six. At the very worst — a quarter of the board behind the leader — a six comes up about one time in four instead of one in six, and every other number comes up a little less often to pay for it. Halfway to that, you get half the help. Level with the leader, or in front, you get none at all: the player in first place always rolls a plain die.

Nothing is ever taken away from anyone. There is no die that makes you roll badly, no hidden hand on the player who is winning. The only thing that moves is how often a six turns up for somebody who is losing, and it moves for whoever that is — you, the person you are playing, or both of you in turn as the lead changes.

The way it is done matters too, and it is the reason this can be said plainly. We do not change the numbers. The day's secret, the fingerprint, the whole promise above — all of that is untouched, and a friendly game is still recomputable roll by roll from it, exactly like a rated one. What changes is only which face a given number is read as. Each roll is filed with the amount of help it was given, so it can be checked afterwards rather than taken on trust.