Dominoes
Dominoes is a family of tile-based games played with pieces. Each domino is a rectangular tile, usually with a line dividing its face into two square ends. Each end is marked with a number of spots or is blank. The backs of the tiles in a set are indistinguishable, either blank or having some common design. The gaming pieces make up a domino set, sometimes called a deck or pack. The traditional European domino set consists of 28 tiles, also known as pieces, bones, rocks, stones, men, cards or just dominoes, featuring all combinations of spot counts between zero and six. A domino set is a generic gaming device, similar to playing cards or dice, in that a variety of games can be played with a set. Another form of entertainment using domino pieces is the practice of domino toppling.
The earliest mention of dominoes is from Song dynasty China found in the text Former Events in Wulin by Zhou Mi. Modern dominoes first appeared in Italy during the 18th century, but they differ from Chinese dominoes in a number of respects, and there is no confirmed link between the two. European dominoes may have developed independently, or Italian missionaries in China may have brought the game to Europe.
The name "domino" is probably derived from the resemblance to a kind of carnival costume worn during the Venetian Carnival, often consisting of a black-hooded robe and a white mask. Namely, the double-one tile looks like the domino mask. Despite the coinage of the word "polyomino" as a generalization, there is no connection between the word "domino" and the number 2 in any language.
The most commonly played domino games are Domino Whist, Matador, and Muggins. Other popular forms include Texas 42, Chicken Foot, Concentration, Double Fives, and Mexican Train. In Britain, the most popular league and pub game is Fives and Threes.
Dominoes have sometimes been used for divination, such as bone throwing in Chinese culture and in the African diaspora.
Construction and composition of domino sets
European-style dominoes are traditionally made of bone, mother of pearl, ivory, or a dark hardwood such as ebony, with contrasting black or white pips which may be inlaid or painted. Some sets feature the top half thickness in mother of pearl, ivory, or bone, with the lower half in ebony. Alternatively, domino sets have been made from many different natural materials: stone ; other woods ; metals ; ceramic clay, or even frosted glass or crystal. These sets have a more novel look, and the often heavier weight makes them feel more substantial; also, such materials and the resulting products are usually much more expensive than polymer materials.Image:Dominoes.jpg|thumb|right|Dominoes
Modern commercial domino sets are usually made of synthetic materials, such as ABS or polystyrene plastics, or Bakelite and other phenolic resins; many sets approximate the look and feel of ivory while others use colored or even translucent plastics to achieve a more contemporary look. Modern sets also commonly use a different color for the dots of each different end value to facilitate finding matching ends. Occasionally, one may find a domino set made of card stock like that for playing cards. Such sets are lightweight, compact, and inexpensive, and like cards are more susceptible to minor disturbances such as a sudden breeze. Sometimes, the tiles have a metal pin in the middle.
The traditional domino set contains one unique piece for each possible combination of two ends with zero to six spots, and is known as a double-six set because the highest-value piece has six pips on each end. The spots from one to six are generally arranged as they are on six-sided dice, but because blank ends having no spots are used, seven faces are possible, allowing 28 unique pieces in a double-six set.
However, this is a relatively small number, especially when playing with more than four people, so many domino sets are "extended" by introducing ends with greater numbers of spots, which increases the number of unique combinations of ends and thus of pieces. Each progressively larger set increases the maximum number of pips on an end by three; so the common extended sets are double-nine, double-12, double-15, and double-18, which is the maximum in practice. As the set becomes larger, identifying the number of pips on each domino becomes more difficult, so some large domino sets use more readable Arabic numerals instead of pips.
History
Chinese dominoes
In China, early "domino" tiles were functionally identical to playing cards. An identifiable version of Chinese dominoes developed in the 12th or 13th century.The oldest written mention of domino tiles in China dates to the 13th century and comes from Hangzhou where pupai and dice are listed as items sold by peddlers during the reign of Emperor Xiaozong of Song. It is not entirely clear that pupai means dominoes, but the same term is used two centuries later by the Ming author Lu Rong in a context that clearly describes domino tiles. The earliest known manual on dominoes is the Manual of the Xuanhe Period which purports to be written by Qu You, but some scholars believe it is a later forgery.
The traditional 32-piece Chinese domino set, made to represent each possible face of two thrown dice and thus having no blank faces, differs from the 28-piece domino set found in the West during the mid 18th century, although Chinese dominoes with blank faces were known during the 17th century.
Each domino originally represented one of the 21 results of throwing two six-sided dice. One half of each domino is set with the pips from one die and the other half contains the pips from the second die. Chinese sets also introduce duplicates of some throws and divide the tiles into two suits: military and civil. Chinese dominoes are also longer than typical European ones.
Dominoes in Europe and North America
Modern dominoes first appeared in Italy during the 18th century, but they differ from Chinese dominoes in a number of respects, and there is no confirmed link between the two. European dominoes may have developed independently, or Italian missionaries in China may have brought the game to Europe. Having been established in Italy, the game of dominoes spread rapidly to Austria, southern Germany and France.The game became fashionable in France in the mid-18th century. The name domino does not appear before that time, being first recorded in 1771, in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux.
There are two earlier recorded meanings for the French word domino, one referring to the masquerades of the period, derived from the term for the hooded garment of a priest, the other referred to crude and brightly colored woodcuts on paper formerly popular among French peasants. The way by which this word became the name of the game of dominoes is likely due to the former: the name of the masquerade costume being associated with the mask itself, and eventually transferred to the double-one tile. The earliest game rules in Europe describe a simple block game for two or four players. Later French rules add the variant of Domino à la Pêche, an early draw game as well as a three-hand game with a pool.
From France, the game was introduced to England by the late 1700s, purportedly brought in by French prisoners-of-war. The early forms of the game in England were the Block Game and Draw Game. The rules for these games were reprinted, largely unchanged, for over half a century. In 1863, a new game variously described as All Fives, Fives or Cribbage Dominoes appeared for the first time in both English and American sources; this was the first scoring game and it borrowed the counting and scoring features of cribbage, but 5 domino spots instead of 15 card points became the basic scoring unit, worth 1 game point. The game was played to 31 and employed a cribbage board to keep score.
In 1864, The American Hoyle describes three new variants: Muggins, Bergen and Rounce; alongside the Block Dominoes and Draw Dominoes. In Muggins, the cribbage board was dropped, 5 spots scored 5 points, and game was now 200 for two players and 150 for three or four. Despite the name, there was no 'muggins rule' as in cribbage to challenge a player who fails to declare his scoring combinations. This omission was rectified in the 1868 edition of The Modern Pocket Hoyle, but reprints of both rule sets continued to be produced in parallel for around twenty years before the version with the muggins rule prevailed. From around 1871, however, the names of All Fives and Muggins, became conflated and many publications issued rules for 'Muggins or All Fives' or 'Muggins or Fives' without making any distinction between the two. This confusion continues to the present day with some publications equating the names and others describing All Fives as a separate game.
In 1889, dominoes was described as having spread worldwide, "but nowhere is it more popular than in the cafés of France and Belgium". From the outset, the European game was different from the Chinese one. European domino sets contain neither the military-civilian suit distinctions of Chinese dominoes nor the duplicates that went with them. Moreover, according to Michael Dummett, in the Chinese games it is only the identity of the tile that matters; there is no concept of matching. Instead, the basic set of 28 unique tiles contains seven additional pieces, six of them representing the values that result from throwing a single die with the other half of the tile left blank, and the seventh domino representing the blank-blank combination. Subsequently 45-piece sets appeared in Austria and, in recent times, 55-piece and 91-piece sets have been produced.
All the early games are still played today alongside games that have sprung up in the last 60 years such as Five Up, Mexican Train and Chicken Foot, the last two taking advantage of the larger domino sets available.
Some modern descriptions of All Fives are quite different from the original, having lost much of their cribbage character and incorporating a single spinner, making it identical, or closely related, to Sniff. Most published rule sets for Muggins include the rule that gives the game its name, but some modern publications omit it even though the muggins rule has been described as the unique feature of this game.
Dominoes is now played internationally. It is recognized as an "ingrained cultural activity within the Caribbean" but is also popular with the Windrush generation in the UK.
In the U.S. state of Alabama, although rarely prosecuted, it was illegal to play dominoes on Sunday within the state until the relevant section of the Alabama Criminal Code was repealed, effective April 21, 2015.