Dice symbols in plain text

The six die faces at U+2680 to U+2685 are unusual in a useful way: they are text symbols, not emoji. The colour-emoji die 🎲 shows a single generic die and cannot tell you what was rolled, whereas ⚀ through ⚅ encode the actual value as a distinct character. That makes them genuinely functional — a scoreboard, a log line or a chat message can record a roll in one character that any font will render.

Because the faces sit in consecutive code points in numeric order, converting a roll to a glyph is arithmetic rather than a lookup. Add the roll to U+267F and you have the character. The Yahtzee game on this site does exactly that: the dice you see are generated from the roll values at render time, which is why they inherit the page accent colour and stay sharp at any zoom.

Unicode also encodes the complete double-six domino set — all 28 tiles, each in a horizontal and a vertical orientation, from U+1F030 to U+1F093, plus a back for each direction. It is a remarkably complete piece of encoding for something so rarely used. Font support is the catch: dominoes arrived alongside emoji and coverage on mobile is patchy, so test before shipping them to a phone audience. The six die faces are far older and render essentially everywhere.

The draughts pieces at U+26C0 to U+26C3 are worth knowing about too, since almost no symbol reference lists them. They give you a man and a king in each colour — exactly what a checkers board needs — as monochrome text that takes your colour. That is what the checkers game here is drawn with.