Dominoes

Pick up a double-six domino set and you're holding twenty-eight rectangular tiles, each one carrying two numbers between zero and six as raised dots, and from that one small set an entire family of genuinely different games gets built. What separates them isn't the tiles — every game on this hub uses the same basic pip-matching principle, laying one open end of a tile against a matching number on the layout — but what a player is actually trying to accomplish once the tiles are down. Some games here are a race to empty your hand first. Others reward specific number combinations as they appear. One turns the whole table into a sprawling branching structure radiating out from a starting double. This hub sorts by that difference; each game's own page covers the actual setup, turn order and scoring in full.

The blocking game underneath everything else

Dominoes (Basics) is the foundational game the rest of this family builds on — draw a hand, take turns laying a tile that matches an open end already on the table, and if you can't play, you pass (or draw from the boneyard, the face-down pile of unused tiles, depending on which house rule the table plays). The round ends the moment one player empties their hand, or when nobody can play at all and the game is "blocked," at which point remaining pips in each hand usually decide the winner. Everything else on this hub either adds a scoring layer to this same core loop, or restructures the layout itself into something more elaborate than a single line of tiles.

Multiples-of-five scoring — Muggins

Muggins, also called All Fives, keeps the same lay-a-matching-tile structure as basic dominoes but adds a scoring hook: whenever the sum of the open, playable ends on the table is a multiple of five, the player who created that total scores points equal to it. That single rule changes the entire feel of the game — instead of just trying to empty your hand, you're constantly scanning the open ends for a play that both fits and produces a scoreable total, and a played tile that blocks an opponent from reaching a multiple-of-five total is genuinely as valuable as one that scores for you directly. It rewards a kind of arithmetic alertness none of the other domino games here ask for.

Branching layouts — Mexican Train and Chicken Foot

Mexican Train and Chicken Foot both abandon the single shared line entirely in favor of a branching structure that starts from one central double tile. In Mexican Train, each player builds and extends their own personal "train" of tiles radiating from that center, and can also add to a shared public train or even someone else's train under specific conditions — the tactical layer comes from deciding when to keep your train private (safe from other players extending it) versus leaving it open. Larger groups commonly play it with a bigger double-twelve set rather than the standard double-six, simply because more players need more starting tiles to go around. Chicken Foot forces a specific branching shape instead of a free one: whenever a double is played, that spot becomes a "foot," and no other tile may be played anywhere on the layout until three tiles have been attached to that foot's open ends, creating a genuinely different rhythm where the whole table's progress can stall around a single double until someone can satisfy it.

Block Dominoes — the same core game, deliberately unscored

Block Dominoes is close to the foundational game covered on the basics page, but it's worth its own entry here because of what it deliberately leaves out: no drawing from the boneyard when you can't play, and no running score carried across multiple hands. A player who can't play simply passes, and the round ends as soon as someone empties their hand or the whole table is blocked. That makes it the leanest, fastest version of a domino game on this hub — good for a table that wants the tile-matching feel without committing to Mexican Train's branching structure or Muggins' constant arithmetic.

How long a set actually lasts you

A single hand of any of these games is genuinely short — often five to fifteen minutes depending on how many players are drawing from a shrinking pool of tiles — but that's rarely the whole story. Mexican Train and Chicken Foot are both traditionally played across a full series of rounds, each one starting from a different double (double-twelve down to double-zero, or whatever range the set covers), with cumulative scores tracked across the entire series rather than settled in a single hand. That turns what looks like a quick game into an evening-length commitment once you account for playing the full sequence. Muggins and basic Dominoes are more flexible — a single hand can be the whole session, or you can agree on a target score and keep dealing new hands until someone reaches it.

What the tiles themselves tell you before you start

The highest double in your set — six in a standard set, nine or twelve in the larger sets some of these games call for — sets a hard ceiling on how large a single tile's total can get, which matters more in Muggins than anywhere else on this hub, since bigger sets mean more distinct multiples-of-five totals are reachable in a single turn. It's also worth checking your set's size against the game before you sit down: Chicken Foot and Mexican Train are both commonly written for larger sets specifically because more players need more starting tiles and more distinct doubles to cycle through across a full series, and trying to run either game with a plain double-six set and five or six players can run out of tiles faster than the rules expect.

Where these games actually come from

Dominoes as tiles have a long history stretching back centuries, but the specific games on this hub are a much more mixed bag of origins than the shared tiles suggest. The basic blocking game and its close relative Muggins are the closest thing to "traditional" dominoes play, close in spirit to how the tiles have been used for generations. Mexican Train, despite the name, is generally understood to be a twentieth-century American adaptation rather than a game with deep Mexican roots — the "train" branching structure and the central starting double are the genuinely distinctive additions, not anything inherited from an older domino tradition. Chicken Foot is a close cousin of the same branching family, differing mainly in how strictly it forces play around a double before the rest of the layout can continue. Knowing that history isn't required to enjoy any of them, but it explains why Mexican Train and Chicken Foot feel like a genuinely different species of game from basic Dominoes and Muggins, despite sharing the same tiles.

Running a full series rather than a single hand

If your table is playing Mexican Train or Chicken Foot as a full series rather than one round, a little upfront planning saves confusion later. Decide before you start whether you're running the full sequence from the highest double down to double-zero (a long evening) or a shortened series using only a handful of doubles (a much faster session), and agree on how a hand-ending penalty gets scored for tiles still in hand — that number is what gets added to a running total across the whole series, and it's worth settling before the first tile is placed rather than mid-series when someone's already unhappy with their score. Basic Dominoes and Muggins are more forgiving here, since a single hand or a short run of hands to an agreed target score is a completely normal way to play either one without any series-length commitment at all.

How to actually choose

If you want the simplest possible introduction to how dominoes actually play, start with Dominoes (Basics) or the even leaner Block Dominoes — both teach the core matching mechanic in under a minute and need nothing beyond a single standard double-six set and a flat surface to play on. If your table wants an actual scoring contest with some mental arithmetic built in, Muggins rewards that directly. And if you have a genuinely large group and want everyone building something of their own rather than sharing one line of tiles, Mexican Train or Chicken Foot scale to a full table far better than the simpler blocking games do.

If a scoring dispute comes up mid-game — how a blocked hand gets settled, whether a specific play was legal — Dominoes (Basics) and Mexican Train both have their own page under Settle an Argument covering exactly that, and a printable score sheet is worth having on hand for any series-length Mexican Train session, where a running total across many rounds is far easier to lose track of on a scrap of paper than a single hand of basic Dominoes ever is. Every other card, dice and board-game family this site covers gets the same treatment under Browse Games by Type, and if you're not sure dominoes are even the right call for tonight, What Should We Play? sorts everything by player count, time and mood instead — a quick round of Block Dominoes and a full Mexican Train series solve very different problems even though they use the exact same box of tiles.