Domino is a flat, thumbsized, rectangular game piece with from one to six pips or dots on its face. It is used in many games and is sometimes stood up to create patterns.
Originally, dominoes were made from bone, silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (MOP), or ivory. However, these days dominoes are mostly made from plastic or wood and can be found in many colors.
There are a variety of games that can be played with dominoes, including billiards, poker, and chess. The most common type of game involves players placing a domino edge to edge against another domino in such a way that its faces are either identical or form some specified total.
Some types of dominoes have numbers printed on them instead of pips. These numbers are easier to read, and some sets have larger pieces that use Arabic numerals for pips, rather than dots.
The basic rules of dominoes are that each player selects seven dominoes from a set of 28 and places them in a pile called the “boneyard”. Then, one player begins by playing one of their dominoes; if the other player does not have a domino with the same number of pips as the domino they have just played, they must pick another domino in the boneyard until they find one with matching pips. The first person to play all of their dominoes wins the game.
Besides being fun, dominoes are also a great tool for learning. They can be played in a number of ways, and they are often incorporated into classroom games to help children learn how to count.
Dominoes are a fun and easy game to play. They can be stacked in long rows, and they look pretty impressive when they are knocked down.
If you want to play a more complex game of dominoes, try the following:
In a game called 5s-and-3s, players attach a domino from their hand to the end of a previously played domino such that the sum of the two ends is divisible by five or three. This score is added up for each time that the dominos are attached.
This type of game can be played by a group of people, and can be quite competitive. Some games are more complicated and have special rules for each individual player.
The most popular Western domino game is block-and-draw, where players draw from a shuffled set and place each of their chosen pieces on the table face down. The leader, who chooses the domino with the highest pips, wins.
A variation on this is the double six set, which has 28 dominoes. The 28 dominoes are then arranged face down in a row.
Most dominoes have a total of pips on each side; some, particularly those in the smaller sets, are written in English letters or symbols rather than pips. Some large sets have a larger number of pips, but these are very rare and are only found in special high-end sets.
