Quick Start

Chinese dominoes differs from Western dominoes in many ways. It has no blanks and it contains 32 tiles instead of 28. Some, but not all tiles are present twice. Same as in a usual double-six set, all dominoes have two halves with one to six pips on them. Ones and fours are always painted red, half of the double-sixes pips are also red. Pip color makes a difference in few games.

Tiles are divided into two suits - civilian and military. All doubles are civilians, but other tiles are distributed into civilian or military suit in a seemingly random way. There are 10 military tiles and 11 civilian tiles. Civilian tiles are duplicated, so in total it makes 32 tiles. This makes Chinese Dominoes set fundamentally asymmetrical, so for example there are more sixes than twos in the set. This asymmetry is seen as an advantage and is utilized in many games in various ways. Some games require even larger asymmetry and remove several singe tiles altogether as in Ding Niu or Mo Hua Hua.

Many games use a concept of “tile combination” - the idea alien to European dominoes. The most obvious are Classical pairs, but there are also other ways of combining dominoes, for example Classical Triplets.

There are many more types of games with Chinese Dominoes than with Western Dominoes. Surely there are Blocking dominoes - the games Westerners are most used to when playing dominoes. The games feel different due to asymmetrical nature of a set. Moreover, mechanics is a bit different too - for example a player must either play a domino or discard it face-down.

But Chinese Dominoes are also often used in a way Westerners use cards. In fact there are paper domino cards sets which are often used to play those games. There are trick-taking games similar to Whist, collecting games similar to Rummy and even Gambling games, similar to Baccarat. Chinese dominoes are also used to play several Solitaire games, which have roots in fortune-telling; and fishing games, which have no popular analogues in the Western world.

Most popular modern games are probably Jie Long, which is a blocking game, Tien Gow, which is a trick taking game, and, surely, Pai Gow - most popular gambling game with Chinese Dominoes. Among fishing games Shi Wu Hu is still played; it uses the paper domino set, but can be adjusted to the ordinary Chinese Domino deck. Many other games were played historically but now faded to oblivion. Such games as Zen solitaire or Korean collecting game Tok are pretty interesting and still have living tradition among several enthusiasts.

Chinese dominoes often come with dice and dice are traditionally used during dealing, but sometimes are used as an important part of the game, most notably in Tibetian Bagchen.

The crash course in Chinese Dominoes consists of the following pages:

Articles:

• Chinese deck and traditions - to better understand deck composition
• Tiles and pairs ranking - to know what are the rankings used in many games

Games:

• Jie Long - rules of a connecting game
• Tien Gow - rules of a trick taking game
• Pai Gow - rules of a gambling game

Or you can simply go the Home Page and read pages in order or whatever you’re interested in.