You would think this would be a simple issue. But I was recently asked how to play Dominoes so I checked YouTube. I watched six “How to Play Dominoes” videos - and I learned six different sets of rules.
I realize Dominoes is in the public domain (or whatever the game equivalent is) but so are games like Chess and Go and they don’t have this confusion about how the game is played.
it looks like the issue is that there is no one set of rules for dominoes, but different variations. It’s not “confusion,” except for the fact that it sounds like you didn’t realize that there are different sets of rules. You’d run into the same thing if you looked for “rules of poker.”
I understand that. But I mentioned Chess as a counter-example. If I was playing Chess and I tried to argue that in the version of Chess I play, pawns move diagonally and capture in the space in front of them, people would tell me that’s not how Chess is played. There’s an agreed upon set of official rules and everything else is just an unofficial variant.
Or “rules of cards”. Dominoes isn’t a game; it’s a set of game pieces, which can be used to play many different games.
Yes, but I’m not talking about the differences in how you play various games like Draw or All Fives or Mexican Train. These are differences in how you play what is claimed to be the same game.
Which game? So far, all you’ve said is that it’s a domino game. That doesn’t say any more than saying it’s a card game.
It’s not claimed to be the same game. There’s Draw Dominoes and Block Dominoes that are played with the same tiles. There’s Five Card Draw Poker and Seven Card Stud Poker played with the same cards.
I’ve been watching videos for different games that are played with dominoes.
But let’s say All Fives as an example. And let’s take a basic issue like scoring. I saw videos that say that if you go out by playing all your dominoes, everyone else adds up the number of pips they have on their remaining dominoes and you score that many points. But other videos say everyone else counts how many pips they have and then rounds the total up to the next highest multiple of five. And other videos say everyone else counts how many pips they have and then rounds the total up or down to the nearest multiple of five.
Or what happens when you can’t play a domino to the train? Some videos say you draw until you get a domino you can play. Other videos say you only draw one domino and pass if you still can’t play.
Or what happens if the boneyard is empty and nobody has a domino they can play? Some videos say the round is a stalemate and nobody scores. Other videos say everyone counts up the pips on their remaining dominoes and whoever has the lowest total wins the round and scores everyone else’s total minus their total.
I thought the only rule of Dominoes was, if they stop knocking each other down before the pattern is complete, you lose.
The point is there aren’t any official rules. Just many variants.
It’s like asking what the rules are to Mao. (Well, maybe not quite since Mao is an extreme example.)
(Also, you’re not supposed to ask what the rules of Mao are.)
And, even within a named variant, it appears that there are a lot of variations.
The website below has rules for a number of variants, but also notes:
The OP specifically mentions “All Fives” in post #8; even for their listing of the “All Fives” rules, the bottom half of the page is taken up with the descriptions of numerous variants.
tl;dr: it appears that, not only are there a ton of variants, but there may not be any one “authority” which establishes any “official rules” for dominoes, probably much to the frustration of someone who wants to know, “what are the rules of dominoes?”
And that’s the difference with the chess example. There is a group which sets the rules for all tournaments:
And even with chess, there are variants. There’s blitz chess, where as soon as your opponent takes their hand off a piece, you have to move a piece, and so on
And there’s mandatory capture chess: if you can capture a piece, you must do so.
What cards, dominoes and chess have in common is that they are playing pieces that can be used in different games. There’s no one set of rules for dominoes, any more than there is one set of rules for cards.
Judging from the responses here, it appears there is no Dominoes equivalent of FIDE.
Heck, there doesn’t even appear to be a general agreement on whether it’s Dominos or Dominoes.
Most of times I played as a kid the rules were the same as Calvinball.
Just FYI, there are definitely more than one set of rules for Go. The most common variants are the Chinese rules and the Japanese rules, but there are also several others. Every Go tournament specifies which set of rules applies.
One simple variation on Go is that it can be played on boards of different sizes.
It’s not that there was one game called chess but that one particular variant got labeled ‘chess’ and other variants were called other things.
Other variants got different names, e.g. shogi, each with different rules and governing bodies.
The pattern appears to be that if/when a particular variant gets sufficiently popular, an organizing body codifies that particularly popular ruleset. That just hasn’t happened for any particular variant of any domino game yet. And may never happen.
Okay, I’m not seeing this. If there’s one particular variant that got labeled chess and other variants are called other things, how is that not the same as saying there is one game called chess?
That’s one way of looking at it, but then “dominos” is not equivalent to chess but equivalent to whatever generic term we want to assign for all games derived from the same source as chess.
So, “All Fives” would be the equivalent to chess. Given more popularity and a several decades/centuries, a central “All Fives” authority might just come about but not one for generic games with domino tiles just as there’s no central authority governing all games played on a tiled board with a variety of pieces each with its own rules of movement and attack.