Dominoes
All Fives, the scoring version, where a tile is worth playing not because it fits but because of what it makes the ends add up to. The rules here follow Pagat's All Fives page point by point.
The rules
- A double-six set: twenty-eight tiles. Each player is dealt nine tiles at two players, seven at three, or five at four. The rest is the boneyard.
- Any tile may be led. This game does not require the highest double to open, which is the commonest alternative and is deliberately not played here.
- On your turn, play a tile so that one of its halves matches an open end of the layout.
- A double is laid crosswise. The first double played becomes the spinner, and the layout can then grow off its two sides as well as along the line.
- A player who cannot go must draw from the boneyard until they can, or until the boneyard is empty. A player holding a playable tile may not draw at all.
- A drawn tile that can be played must be played, so drawing is never a way to hold on to something.
Scoring
- After each play, add up the open ends of the layout. If the total is a multiple of five, you score it.
- A double sitting at an end counts both of its halves: a six-six at an end counts twelve.
- The spinner counts both its halves until tiles have been played against both of its sides. Once the layout runs past it on both sides it stops counting.
- A single tile alone on the table is one end and not two, so its halves are not counted twice.
- The highest total reachable in one play is thirty-five.
- Going out scores the pips left in everybody else's hands, added up and then rounded once to the nearest multiple of five. Three rounds up to five; two rounds down to nothing.
- On this site every score is divided by five and the target is 61, which is the version scored on a cribbage board.
How a hand and a game end
- A hand ends when somebody plays their last tile and goes out.
- A hand is blocked when nobody can play and the boneyard is empty. The lightest hand wins the blocked hand and scores as if it had gone out.
- If two hands tie for lightest at two or four players, nobody scores. At three players, the two tied players split the third player's pips between them.
- The game ends the moment a player reaches 61, and tiles still in hand at that point are not played or counted.
Drawing is done for you. A turn with exactly one possible outcome is not a decision, and spending a day of a correspondence deadline on one is how a thirty-play hand becomes a three-month game. Muggins is not played either: in the parlour game a player must announce a score and an opponent may call "Muggins" to steal it, which is a rule about human inattention with no meaning when the server is doing the counting.
Dominoes terms
- The boneyard
- The undealt tiles, drawn from when you cannot go.
- The spinner
- The first double played. The layout may grow off both of its sides, and it counts both halves until it is covered on both.
- Open ends
- The faces at the ends of the layout. Their total is what you are trying to make a multiple of five.
- Going out
- Playing your last tile, which ends the hand and scores the pips left in everybody else's hands.
- A blocked hand
- Nobody can play and the boneyard is empty. The lightest hand wins it.