Eight Trigrams
The original name of the game is 解八卦 (Jie Ba Gua). It was invented by Ming FanXin, a Chinese domino enthusiast who helped me work out the rules of several traditional games.
Eight tiles are arranged in a circle. For each of these tiles, three more tiles are placed perpendicular to it on the outside of the circle. All tiles are then turned face down.
Example of an initial position
You can compare the layout with the image of a traditional trigram.
A tile that is “sandwiched” between two others cannot be used until at least one of the adjacent tiles has been removed. If all three perpendicular tiles next to an inner-circle tile have already been played, only then may this inner-circle tile be used.
Game in progress, [6:2] tile is available for a play
From the available tiles, the player must form either classic triplets or classic pairs . If no tiles remain on the table at the end of the game, the final score is doubled.
Scoring
Points are awarded as follows:
- Full Dragon - 6 points
- Five Sons - 5 points
- Coincidence - 4 points
- Split - 3 points
- Big Dragon, Little Dragon and Two-Three-Kao - 3 points
- Five Points - 3 points
- Full Fourteen - 1 point
- Any pair - 3 points
- The Supreme Pair - 9 points
Points for a pair are counted even if the pair forms part of a triplet.
For example, any Five Sons combination contains a civil pair, so it actually scores 5 + 3 = 8 points. Similarly, the combination [2:1][4:2][4:4] is worth 12 points in total - 3 points for Five Points and 9 points for the Supreme Pair.