Chinese Dominoes

Noone is absolutely positive about where or when Chinese dominoes first came into existence, but European travelers during the Renaissance reported the game and it is still popular in Asian countries today. The games were standardized by the twelfth century, but may have existed some time before then. It is often incorrectly assumed that Chinese dominoes was the forerunner of Mah Jong.

Chinese dominoes are way different from Western dominoes. About the only thing both games have in common is a relationship to the dice used in their cultures. However, Chinese dominoes are very strongly related to chinese dice.

There is a good chance that domino tiles started as a way to record the throw of the banker in a popular dice game called Tien Gow. The game starts with a banker covering bets against other players and then throwing a pair of dice. The banker's roll or point is either in the Civil suit or the Military suit. The suits are sets of pairs which will discuss later. If the banker rolls the highest pair in his suit, he immediately wins all bets; if he rolls the lowest pair in his suit, he immediately loses all of his bets. Otherwise the dice are passed to the other players who try to roll a higher pair in the same suit as the banker; no money is exchanged on ties. It is easy to see how this dice game influenced Pai Gow and other Chinese domino games.

The tiles are longer and narrower than the "double square" shape used in the West. This is because the games played with them use the tiles like playing cards to build melds or like dice to make totals rather than to build chains of tiles on the table top. In order to do this they have to have a shape which allows several of them to be held at once, so most pieces are about one inch wide and about two and a half inches long.

They have no dividing bar in the center to separate the two ends. The two ends are separated by either distance, clustering or colors. The games usually depend on the total number of pips and the suit (Civil or Military), so matching the ends is not as important as in western domino games.

Just like on a Chinese die, the one pip and the four pip are always colored red. The other pips are all colored white, except for the double six. The double six separates the two ends by coloring three pips red and three pips white in each pip. Twos are denoted as two white spots side by side (like Chinese dice) on the extreme end, not on a diagonal like Western dominoes and dice. Koreans sometimes use a large red spot for the one, again following the convention of Chinese dice. The three pips are normally shown as a diagonal, except on the double three dominoes, where the spots are sometimes laid out as two horizontal, two vertical and two horizontal groupings.

Unlike Western dominoes, there are no blanks tiles in Chinese dominoes. The Western contains 28 tiles in the standard double six set; the Chinese set contains 32 . In most Western domino games, the total is not as important as the values on each half of the tile. The ranking, name, coloring and arrangement of pips of Chinese dominoes is solely based on tradition. The important things in the Chinese games are the total pips (usually taken modulus ten) and forming ranked pairs of tiles.

Chinese dominoes are divided into two series -- Military and Civil. These are the same series used in Chinese dice games and their ranking is not in numeric order.

• The Military series consists of ten dominoes, ranked by their
• totals as in dice games. Notice that there are no doubles in the Military suit.
• The Civil series is made of eleven pairs of identical dominoes. There are traditional names for the pairs and for each tile, much like the names that we assign to the throw of dice in a game of Craps ([1-1] is "snake eyes", [6-6] is "boxcars", [4-4] is a "hard eight") or in playing card games (the Jack of Spades and the Queen of Diamonds are a "Pinochle", A full house of Aces and Eights are the "Dead man's hand" in Poker, and so forth).

Another way to look at the Chinese domino set is using pairs:

Western dominoes usually have a spinner in the middle of the dividing bar on their face. This is a little metal rounded nail rom resting flat on the table top. Chinese dominoes are always flat faced and can be stacked. The Chinese tiles are mixed in the same manner as Western dominoes, but while Western games leave the tiles loosely spread on the table top in a "boneyard", Chinese games build a "woodpile" by stacking the dominoes in one or more rows which are made of stacks of tiles of a certain heights; the exact shape of the woodpile and how you deal the stacks varies for each game.

One common method is to throw the dice (usually three dice) and count the stacks in the woodpile. The first player gets the stack determined by the dice and then each player takes the next one in line according to the dealing schedule.