If you and some friends have an afternoon or an evening to kill, the Tablets of Fate can be an entertaining, enlightening and intriguing way of passing the time. I first came across this divination method in Predicting Your Future by the Diagram Group, New York: Ballantine Books, 1983. No one knows for sure how old the Tablets of Fate are, but they first started popping up in seventeen-century chapbooks.
Chapbooks were cheaply-printed-and-sold pamphlets on a variety of subjects, which were more easy to mass-produce and sell than actual books, which required significantly more labor. They satisfied an increasing need for reading material by an increasingly-literate public, and the Tablets of Fate satisfied the need for oracular wisdom by a public who could afford chapbooks but not professional oracles.
The Tablets of Fate were probably the product a collaboration between an occultist and a printer. They enjoyed a renewed popularity in the nineteenth century, but more as a parlor game than as a serious method of divination. One of the advantages of this divination method is, once you get the hang of how it is designed, and the answers written, you can design Tablets of Fate yourself.