Where do dominoes come from?

The earliest domino-like tiles appear in Chinese records from the Song dynasty, where writers describe games played with tiles representing every throw of two dice. Chinese dominoes survive today as a 32-tile set used for games like pai gow - a separate branch of the same family. The western 28-tile set, from double blank to double six, is a later, streamlined descendant.

Western dominoes surface in 18th-century Italy and France, spreading through cafes and salons before crossing to Britain - the story goes that French prisoners of war carried the game over. The name likely borrows from the domino, a black-and-white hooded cloak worn at masquerades, a fitting match for tiles of ebony and ivory. From there the game travelled with sailors to the Caribbean and Latin America, where it became a cultural fixture.

In Britain the game found a permanent home in pubs, where leagues standardised Fives and Threes and played it on cribbage boards to exactly 61. The American branch produced All Fives, the scoring game we host on our homepage. Every classic variant is explained in the rules hub, and all of them are free to play here.