Before we get going here, I want to warn you that this post very much contains a pretty big SPOILER. So, if you haven't seen The Last Jedi yet, you'll want to...
Okay, now, for the rest of you who've made it this far, let's talk about THAT thing Luke gave Leia near the end of Last Jedi.
I'm of course talking about the GOLD DICE Luke gave Leia — because you, like myself, probably had/have questions. (And, to be clear, the dice shown below are NOT the same ones from Last Jedi.)
So, here's the deal. Those were effectively known as "Han Solo's dice." And, as you saw earlier in Last Jedi, Luke grabbed them from the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. Which is where they've supposedly been this whole time.
A close-up for fun:
The dice were actually a super tiny Easter egg that the production design team added way back in Episode IV — A New Hope.
Speaking with Vanity Fair earlier this year, Lucasfilm Story Group exec Pablo Hidalgo said that the filmmakers brought this tiny detail back for 2015's Force Awakens:
The story that you would hear if you traveled to cantinas or watering holes around the Star Wars galaxy, is that those dice were involved in a game of Corellian Spike — a dice-using version of a card game called sabacc. Rumor has it Han won the Millennium Falcon (from Lando Calrissian) with those dice. Whether or not that’s just bar talk, I can’t say.
You can see a close-up of the dice in Vanity Fair's photo shoot for Force Awakens here:
But the dice in Last Jedi didn't have normal dots like the ones seen in Force Awakens. They had symbols more akin to an alien language, possibly Aurebesh (i.e., the official Star Wars language and alphabet).
And, from the best of my memory, some of the symbols on the dice in Last Jedi looked like this:
In fairness, this small change was probably done on purpose, because if you're going to have a hero shot of a prop that's supposed to hold serious sentimental value, you may as well make it more Star Wars–y, right?
