Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest known dice were excavated from the ruins of the Burnt City in south-eastern Iran, dating back to between 2800 and 2500 BCE. These artifacts emerged from a backgammon-like game set, proving that the human desire to introduce chance into decision-making predates recorded history by millennia.
Precision dice are generally larger, translucent, and have flush markings with sharp corners and edges, whereas non-precision dice are smaller, opaque, and feature recessed markings with rounded corners and edges. Non-precision dice are manufactured via the plastic injection molding process, often made of polymethyl methacrylate, with pips or numbers that are part of the mold.
The modern tradition of using sets of polyhedral dice started around the end of the 1960s when non-cubical dice became popular among players of wargames. Five of the dice in a standard set are shaped like the Platonic solids, including the cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron.
The term snake eyes, referring to a roll of one pip on each die, traces its use back to 1919 according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. The US term boxcars, also known as midnight, describes a roll of six pips on each die, a name derived from the visual resemblance of the pair of six pips to a pair of boxcars on a freight train.
Cleromancy is the practice of using dice for divination, a method employed by Tibetan Buddhists and likely by the Pythagoreans, who referred to such dice as the dice of the gods. Astrological dice are a specialized set of three 12-sided dice for divination, where the first die represents the planets, the Sun, the Moon, and the nodes of the Moon.