About Game Die
Game Die is the Unicode character 🎲 at codepoint U+1F3B2 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
The pictographic die, as against the six that show faces. U+1F3B2 sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. Six other characters cover the same object differently: U+2680 to U+2685, DIE FACE-1 through DIE FACE-6, one per face, none of them an emoji and none of them rendering in colour. U+2680's chart entry cross-references this character, which is how the standard records that the two treatments belong together. CLDR's keywords are dice, die, entertainment and game — no number among them, because this character does not show a value the way the face characters do.
Typical uses
- Chance, randomness and shuffling, which is what the keywords describe
- Board and tabletop game contexts
- Not for writing out a specific roll — U+2680 to U+2685 are the characters for that
At a glance
- U+1F3B2, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- Six sibling characters, U+2680 to U+2685, show one face each and are not emoji
- Filed with the games, a subgroup of twenty-four fully qualified entries
- No HTML named entity. Write 🎲 or 🎲
Historical Notes
Origins
The object is far older than any of this, and its history is not the character's. The encoding question is narrower and answerable: why one object needed seven characters.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. The six die faces at U+2680 to U+2685 are older and live in Miscellaneous Symbols, a text block — they carry no emoji property, so they are drawn in the surrounding font's colour like any letter.
One object, two encoding jobs
The six face characters exist so that a specific roll can be written as text: each has a fixed value and reads as that value. This character has no value at all — vendors choose which faces to show and the pips are part of the drawing rather than data. That is the split the standard makes throughout the emoji set: a text symbol denotes something exactly, and a pictograph depicts it. Neither substitutes for the other, and the cross-reference on U+2680 is Unicode saying so in the chart.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Game Die
To use the Game Die symbol (🎲) in HTML, insert the
entity 🎲 directly into your markup. The decimal entity 🎲 works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\1F3B2';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F3B2}' evaluates to 🎲. In Python source, write '\U0001F3B2'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 8E B2 as UTF-8 bytes and D83C DFB2 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 127922.
This is a fully-qualified emoji and should render with colour on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Appearance may vary between platforms, but the underlying codepoint is identical everywhere.
Things to know
- If you need a value, use U+2680 to U+2685. Those characters mean one through six; this one does not mean anything numeric.
- The face characters are not emoji, so they inherit the text colour and the surrounding font metrics rather than rendering as pictures.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83C DFB2 in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
- Not Emoji_Modifier_Base and not a variation-sequence base.
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
- No named HTML entity. Write 🎲 or 🎲.
In the Wild
An encyclopaedia article on dice has a section on Unicode representation which sets out a row of seven symbols — the six face characters and this one — against their codepoints.
That is a rare place where the die is typed rather than defined, and even there it is a table explaining that the character exists alongside six others. It appears otherwise as CLDR annotation entries and a chart cell: the character being catalogued, not rolled.
Pages change; this is what that one showed on the day.
FAQ
How do I write a specific roll?
Use U+2680 to U+2685, the six face characters. Each one is a fixed value.
Do the pips on this one mean anything?
No. Which faces are visible is a drawing decision made by each vendor, not information in the character.
Are the face characters emoji?
No. They carry no emoji property and render in the text colour.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 🎲 or 🎲.