Playing Block Dominoes as a Family: Teaching, House Rules and Scorekeeping

Block Dominoes needs one rule to start playing and about three more to play properly, which suits a table with a six-year-old at one end and a grandparent at the other. This article covers teaching the game in three stages, the house rules to settle before the first tile goes down, a scoresheet that adds up, and what changes with two or three players. The full rules are on the how to play page; what follows assumes them.

Teaching the game in three stages

Children pick up matching in minutes and scoring in an evening. Teach them in separate sittings. Each stage is a complete game, so a child who stops at stage one is still playing real Block Dominoes, just without the score.

Stage one: match the ends

Play with two people and deal seven tiles each. The other fourteen go face down at the side of the table and are not touched again until the next hand. Whoever holds the highest double puts it down first. After that, each turn is one tile placed against either end of the line so that the touching halves show the same number. If nothing in your hand fits either end, you say "pass" and the turn moves on. The hand ends when one player has no tiles left, or when both players pass one after the other. Do not count pips yet, and do not explain why a pass matters; just make sure the child says the word out loud, because stage three depends on it.

Here is a stage-one hand between Maya and her gran. Maya was dealt 6-6, 6-2, 5-3, 4-1, 3-3, 2-0 and 1-1. Gran was dealt 5-5, 6-4, 5-2, 4-4, 3-1, 2-2 and 0-0. Maya holds the 6-6, so she opens with it. Gran answers with 6-4, Maya plays 6-2 on the other end, Gran adds 4-4, Maya plays 2-0, and Gran plays 0-0. After those six tiles the line looks like this.

It is Maya's turn. She started with seven tiles and has played three (6-6, 6-2 and 2-0), so four remain: 5-3, 4-1, 3-3 and 1-1. The ends show 0 and 4. Only one of her four tiles carries either number.

Positions with exactly one legal play are the best teaching moments in stage one, because the child can find the answer alone. Ask "which of your tiles has a 0 or a 4 on it?" rather than pointing.

Stage two: count what is left

Once matching is automatic, add the score. When a hand ends, every player who did not go out turns their remaining tiles face up and adds the pips on them. The winner scores the total of everybody else's pips. If the hand was blocked, the player with the lowest pip total is the winner and scores the pips in the other hands, not counting their own.

Counting pips is the first job a child can own at the table. Take the fifth hand from the scoresheet further down, a three-player hand that blocked with both ends showing 3 and nobody holding a 3. Dad has one tile left, Gran has two and Maya has one.

Have the child do the adding, and settle any dispute by counting the dots on the tile itself. No single tile is worth more than 12, so the sums stay small.

Stage three: notice the pass

The last idea turns Block Dominoes from a matching exercise into a game. Because there is no drawing, a player who passes on ends showing 5 and 2 has no 5 and no 2 in their hand, and that stays true for the rest of the hand. The child already knows what a pass is; now show them what it means. Suppose Gran has just passed on 5 and 2, and Maya holds three tiles.

Either play is legal. The 5 is a number Gran has already admitted she cannot answer, so leaving it there costs Maya nothing and may cost Gran another turn. Playing 2-4 keeps that 5 in place and opens a 4; playing 5-0 gives it up and opens a 0, which Gran may well hold. How far pass information can be taken is the subject of a separate article; at the family table, remembering one pass is plenty.

House rules to agree before the first hand

Most arguments at a family table are about things the rules leave open. Settle these before play and write the answers at the top of the scoresheet, so they cannot be renegotiated after a bad hand.

• The target score. The first player to reach it wins the evening. One hundred is a reasonable target for a short session; the scoresheet below reaches it in six hands. Agree whether you must hit the target exactly or simply pass it; passing it is the usual choice.
• Ties in a blocked hand. Two players can be left with the same pip total. The common choices are that nobody scores and the deal moves on, or that the tied players share the points from the other hands. The game on this site never splits a tie: it gives the hand to one of the tied players by seat order. Pick one and write it down.
• Whether the opener may choose. The standard rule, and the one the game here enforces, is that the highest double must be played to open. Some families let its holder open with any tile. That is a real advantage, since it lets them keep a double back, so decide in advance and apply it to everyone.
• No doubles at all. With two or three players some doubles are in the set-aside pile, so nobody may hold one. Then the heaviest tile opens and its holder may open with any tile. Say this before it comes up; a child told "the highest double starts" will be confused the first time there is none.
• Who shuffles. Rotate the shuffle one seat each hand, and let a child shuffle even if it takes a while.

A scoresheet that adds up

One line per hand is enough. Record who won, what the losers were holding, the points the winner took, and a running total for every player. Writing the losers' tiles down as well as the total means a disagreement can be settled by re-adding rather than by memory. Here is a complete three-player game to a target of 100.

Check the first line: Gran was left with 6-4 and 2-1, which is 10 + 3 = 13; Dad with 5-5, 3-0 and 1-0, which is 10 + 3 + 1 = 14; so Maya scores 13 + 14 = 27. The fifth line is the blocked hand from the diagram above, worth 23 to Dad. In the sixth hand Maya went out while Gran still held three doubles, 6-6, 5-5 and 4-4, worth 12 + 10 + 8 = 30, and Dad held 6-5 and 3-3, worth 11 + 6 = 17; those 47 points took Maya from 54 to 101 and ended the game. The points column sums to 27 + 20 + 21 + 27 + 23 + 47 = 165, and so do the three final totals, 101 + 20 + 44 = 165. That equality is the check to run whenever a running total looks wrong.

Two and three players

Every player takes seven tiles whatever the number of players, so only the set-aside pile changes size. With four players the deal uses all 28 tiles and nothing is set aside. With three, 21 tiles are dealt and 7 are set aside. With two, 14 are dealt and 14 are set aside, half the set. The set-aside tiles are out of the hand entirely; they are not a pile to take from, which is the difference between this game and Draw Dominoes.

The practical effect in a two-player game is that a number can go missing for no reason anyone can see. Seven tiles carry a 5, and with 14 tiles set aside most of them may be in the pile. Turning the pile face up at the end of the hand explains this better than words. The odds are worked through in the mathematics article.

Three is the deal where the scoresheet earns its keep, since a winner collects from two hands and the arithmetic is no longer a single addition.

Using the Easy level as a practice partner

The game on this site is one human seat against computer opponents, with the difficulty chosen from the selector below the table. On a screen narrower than 640 pixels it deals two seats, and on a wider one four; there is no other way to choose the number of players, and no three-player deal online.

The Easy opponent plays the first legal tile in its hand, in the order the tiles sit there. It does not prefer doubles, does not shed heavy tiles and takes no notice of passes. That is the opponent a stage-one child needs: it makes the same kind of mistakes a beginner makes, and it loses often enough to keep a child at the screen. Let them play a whole hand through to the moment the score appears, because that screen is the stage-two lesson without any adult having to count.

Move up when the child stops losing to Easy. Medium sheds doubles and heavy tiles and keeps tiles that still match an open end; in 6,000 simulated hands it beat Easy 59.6% of the time. Hard adds pass-tracking and end control and beat Medium 54.6% of the time over the same number of hands. A child who has reached stage three will find Hard watching for passes just as they are. The score accumulates across hands until you press New Game, so a session against the computer can be played to 100 like the table game, with the scoresheet above.