Math finally cracks fair 'Go First' dice for five players after 15 years

A puzzle first floated at a 2012 gaming convention has finally been resolved: how to build dice that let each player roll once and settle who goes first with zero chance of a tie and equal odds for everyone. Auburn University mathematician Eric Harshbarger and a loose, rotating group of roughly 20 collaborators had long known such ‘Go First’ dice were mathematically possible — the hard part was turning the math into a shape you could actually manufacture and roll. Two-, three-, and four-player sets fell quickly, solved with four 12-sided dice, but the five-player case resisted for years.

Early five-player solutions existed only on paper and were absurd to build — one required dice with about 1,440 faces. The group whittled that down over time, first to a 120-sided set contributed by a researcher in Australia, and finally to a practical 60-sided set found by Canadian software engineer Paul Meyer. Meyer treated it as a computational problem, seeding a brute-force search with patterns from earlier solutions; the space of candidate designs outnumbered the atoms in the universe, but he pruned it enough to land a working answer, which Harshbarger verified.

The golf-ball-sized dice are now on sale, though some observers doubt real-world manufacturing can match the theory. Harshbarger counters that the math is exact and any unfairness would come from production tolerances, not the design. The team is still chasing open questions — whether a five-player set can drop to the known 30-face minimum, and whether the idea extends to six players — problems their current tools can’t yet crack.