Both cubic dice and four-faced long dice are found as early as the mid third millennium BCE at Indus Valley civilisation sites; these are marked variously with dot-and-ring figures, linear devices, and Indus Valley signs.
[6] These include distinctive roughly ovoid Westerwanna-type dice (named for the site of their initial discovery in Lower Saxony); these are typically about 2 cm in length and marked with dot-and-ring figures of values 2-3-4-5.
[7] Long dice are used with the Scandinavian games Daldøs (typically marked A-II-III-IIII[8] or X-II-III-IIII[9]) and Sáhkku (with a variety of similar markings including X-II-III-[blank][10]); these dice may be so short as to exhibit nearly square faces, and therefore feature pyramidal ends.
Barrel dice are a more recent design, used most often by players of role playing games and wargames.
They appear roughly cylindrical, and are generally modified antiprisms with between four and twenty flattened triangular facets, each numbered.