In Ian Fleming’s famed James Bond novels, suave British Agent 007 often passes the time in casinos playing chemin de fer, a French version of the centuries-old card game baccarat (pronounced BAH-kah-rah). That sophisticated allure still holds sway today, yet the game is easy for anyone to learn and enjoy this taste of elegant life.

Baccarat began more than six centuries ago in Italy, where it was played with Tarot cards. The name comes from an old Italian word for “zero,” the value held by tens and face cards in the game. In the late-15th century, a standard deck had taken hold, and baccarat soon gained popularity among the nobility in France. Casinos there developed 007’s preferred chemin de fer, literally “railroad,” which describes the way the shoe, the device from which cards are dealt, travels around the table from player to player like a locomotive.

British high society evolved the rules by which most baccarat is played today (see The Rules), which traveled to casinos in South America and Cuba and then to the United States, coming to be known as “American” rules. Another variation, called Mini Baccarat, developed in U.S. casinos largely as a way to make the sometimes elite-seeming game feel more welcoming to everyone, with a smaller table, lower stakes, and faster, more exciting play conducted entirely by the Dealer.

Humankind has enjoyed dice games for some 4,000 years, dating as far back as the ancient Egyptians. The game was played in ancient Greece, too. Soldiers of the Roman Empire reputedly rolled dice carved from sheep’s anklebones. Arabs did, too. Hence the slang word used for this to this day: bones. In medieval France and England, nobles and peasants alike bet on the outcome of thrown dice.

The dice game known today as Craps, however, had its origins in 19th-century America in gaming rooms on board the majestic steamboats that plied the nation’s waterways, including the mighty Mississippi, and in the great Mississippi port city of New Orleans. A key element of the game as it evolved was the fact that when a roll of the two dice came up a losing “2,” the single spots on each die together looked like the beady eyes of a crab, or crabe in the French dialect spoken by New Orleans’ Cajun inhabitants. That losing roll came to be referred to as “crabes,” or “crabs,” a word later corrupted into the now-familiar name of the game: Craps.

Today, Craps is enjoyed in casinos worldwide, where players gather around and place their bets on the elongated table, with its raised wall at one or both ends against which the pair of dice is thrown. The rush to place bets, the dramatic throw and tumble of the dice, the sense of expectation, and the happy cries of victory make Craps one the most exciting and fun games in which to participate. Online Craps games bring that excitement home, offering anyone the opportunity to bet on one or more thrilling rolls of the dice.

If you love playing the lottery, then Keno could well be the game for you. It actually started as a lottery, most historians say, in China over two millennia ago, when Cheung Lung, a Han Dynasty ruler, cunningly persuaded citizens to fund a war beyond their usual taxes, offering them a chance at big cash prizes by paying to select the winning combination drawn from a rhyming roster of 120 different Chinese characters. The game proved so popular that it spread, eventually funding the construction of the Great Wall of China!

Chinese immigrants to America in the late-19th century brought with them what came to be known as the Chinese Lottery. It soon was simplified to just 80 characters and then, to make it comprehensible to non-Chinese, numbers. Wanting the game to seem less a matter of luck and to introduce the sense that skill could play a part, smart casino operators in the mid-20th century began calling it “Horse Race Keno,” as if each number was a horse the player was picking, eventually shortening it to the common present-day term.