The "dice throw" is a method of review

Review

A review is an evaluation of a publication, a product or a service, such as a movie , video game, musical composition , book ; a piece of hardware like a car, home appliance, or computer; or an event or performance, such as a live music concert, a play, musical theater show or dance show...

 which is often used in Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 and occasionally in Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

. It is characterized by the use of a white-on-red die graphic to represent the movie's rating in the review, in contrast to the stars

Star (classification)

Stars are often used as symbols for classification purposes. They are used by reviewers for ranking things such as movies, TV shows, restaurants, and hotels. For example, one to five stars is commonly employed to categorize hotels.-Restaurant ratings:...

 or letters used elsewhere.

It was introduced by film director and then-film critic Arne Skouen, who, writing for Verdens Gang

Verdens Gang

Verdens Gang , generally known under the abbreviation VG, is a Norwegian tabloid newspaper...

on 31 March 1952, stated the need of "having a film première characterized in a short, concise form". To do this, he used a standard die

Dice

A die is a small throwable object with multiple resting positions, used for generating random numbers...

 with six pips, where one marked the lowest possible rating of a film, and six marked the highest. In some cases, a die with zero pips has been used, meaning awful. Similarly, people sometimes allude to "seven pips", meaning extraordinarily good.

In time, the dice throw spread to other parts of the media. Firstly, it is used by about forty Norwegian newspapers, numerous magazines and television shows for review purposes. An analysis in 2002 found dice throws in 41 out of 254 daily newspapers in Norway. Secondly, it was used to characterize several other products than films. Even people have been reviewed with "throws of the dice", for instance to grade the achievements of a political officeholder.

It has also been used for blurbing

Blurb

A blurb is a short summary or some words of praise accompanying a creative work, usually used on books without giving away any details, that is usually referring to the words on the back of the book jacket but also commonly seen on DVD and video cases, web portals, and news websites.- History :The...

, as a quick, graphic way of expressing the worthiness of a product. Writer Ari Behn

Ari Behn

Ari Mikael Behn is a Norwegian author, and is best known as the husband of Princess Märtha Louise of Norway. He has written two novels, a collection of short stories and a book about his wedding...

 gained some note when he, after receiving a favourable dice throw review with six pips, tattooed the dice on his upper arm for maximum exposure. At times, companies who use dice throws for blurbs have been caught cheating, in that they claim positive dice throw reviews which do not exist.

In 1998, the newspapers Verdens Gang, Dagbladet

Dagbladet

Dagbladet is Norway's second largest tabloid newspaper, and the third largest newspaper overall with a circulation of 105,255 copies in 2009, 18,128 papers less than in 2008. The editor in chief is Lars Helle....

and Aftenposten

Aftenposten

Aftenposten is Norway's largest newspaper. It retook this position in 2010, taking it from the tabloid Verdens Gang which had been the largest newspaper for several decades. It is based in Oslo. The morning edition, which is distributed across all of Norway, had a circulation of 250,179 in 2007...

brought legal charges against Nettavisen

Nettavisen

Nettavisen was the first Norwegian online newspaper that was not established in relation to a pre-existing real-life newspaper. It started up on 1 November 1996...

for extracting dice throws from reviews and reprinting it. The three newspapers argued that this was an abuse of their reviews, since the dice was taken out of context, and won the case in Oslo City Court

Oslo District Court

Oslo District Court is the district court serving Oslo, Norway. Cases may be appealed to Borgarting Court of Appeal. As the largest district court in Norway, it handles about 20% of all cases in the country...

. In 2002, the Verdens Gang wanted to add their own touch to the dice throw review, which they had created, and added the newspaper's logo to the dice graphic.

According to a 2005 master's thesis at the University of Bergen

University of Bergen

The University of Bergen is located in Bergen, Norway. Although founded as late as 1946, academic activity had taken place at Bergen Museum as far back as 1825. The university today serves more than 14,500 students...

 it is very seldom used outside of Norway, an exception being the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet

Svenska Dagbladet

Svenska Dagbladet is a daily newspaper in Sweden. The first issue appeared on 18 December 1884. Svenska Dagbladet is published in Stockholm and provides coverage of national and international news as well as local coverage of the Greater Stockholm region...

. The dice throw coincides with the grading

Grade (education)

Grades are standardized measurements of varying levels of comprehension within a subject area. Grades can be assigned in letters , as a range , as a number out of a possible total , as descriptors , in percentages, or, as is common in some post-secondary...

system in Norwegian schools (excluding higher education), where 1 is the lowest and 6 is the highest grade. This grading system was not in use when the dice throw review was introduced; it was introduced later.