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 (gambling plaques or tiles) and
dice are listed as items sold by peddlers during the reign of
Emperor Xiaozong of Song (r. 1162–1189). 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 (2d6). 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
France during the mid-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. 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 ("Fishing Domino"), 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 (
double eight) sets appeared in
Austria and, in recent times, 55-piece (
double nine) and 91-piece (
double twelve) 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 (who have Caribbean heritage) 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. ==Tiles and suits==