Suddenly players could now gather around the roulette table, watch as a numbered wheel, with alternating red and black colours was spun, and a tiny metal ball was, in turn, spun along the rim of the wheel in the opposite direction. Before the introduction of the roulette wheel and table, card and dice games had been the order of the day. When the game was first introduced in fashionable gambling houses around Paris, people were fascinated with the wheel. As the popular story goes, a famous French mathematician discovered the wheel purely as a by-product of his attempts at creating the world’s first perpetual motion machine. The story of roulette’s birth is quite an interesting and somewhat amusing since its inception was purely accidental.

While that answer may always be a mystery, one thing is for sure, in roulette the wheel definitely came first! Roulette is believed to be one of the oldest casino games in the world and its history stretches back to the 1700’s in Europe, where the game as we know it was born. We’ve all heard the argument about which came first, the chicken or the egg, something that has been debated for centuries.