Dominoes — free online dominoes against the computer

The standard double-six set: 28 tiles, seven each, the rest face down in the boneyard. Play a tile that matches one of the two open ends, or draw until you find one. Whoever runs out of tiles first wins the round and takes the pips left in the other hand; if nobody can move, the lower total wins.

Your score is rounds won in a row, so a single loss or a draw ends the run. The chain is drawn as a simple line because in dominoes the shape on the table means nothing — only the two open ends are ever playable, and they are shown above your hand. Free, instant, and a half-finished round is saved if you have to leave.

How to play

• Tap a tile in your hand. If it fits both ends you are asked which one.
• Tiles that fit nothing are dimmed. If none of yours fit, press Draw.
• Whoever holds the highest double leads the round; if neither has one, the heaviest tile decides.
• Play out all seven and you win the round, taking the pips left in the computer's hand.
• If the boneyard is empty and neither of you can move, the lower pip total wins.
• A loss or a draw ends the run. Your score is the streak.

Counting, and why dominoes is not a luck game

Twenty-eight tiles, seven in your hand, seven in the computer's, fourteen face down. That looks like a game of chance until you notice how much of the hidden information leaks out on every turn. Each of the seven suits — blanks through sixes — appears on exactly seven tiles in the set. You can see your own, and you can see every tile on the table, so at any moment you know exactly how many of each suit are unaccounted for.

The moment that matters is when your opponent draws. A draw is a public admission that neither open end matched anything in their hand, which rules out two whole suits at once. Two draws on the same pair of ends and you know that suit is either exhausted or sitting entirely in the boneyard. That is the single most valuable piece of information in the game, and it is free.

What you do with it is the other half. If the computer cannot play fives, then a board showing five at both ends is a board it must draw on, and every draw makes its hand heavier while yours empties. The technical name is closing the game on a suit, and it works because doubles let you keep an end unchanged — playing the five-five leaves five showing, so you can hold a suit open across a turn.

The counter-argument is worth knowing too: you can only hold a suit if you have enough of it, and there are only seven of each. Hoarding a suit to block with means playing heavy tiles late, and if the round blocks with them still in your hand you lose on pips. The balance between blocking and unloading is the whole game, and it is why dominoes survived four hundred years of people insisting it was luck. If you want a card game with the same counting problem, Hearts punishes you for the same failure to keep track.

More games

More from 🃏 Card & solitaire games:

• Solitaire — Classic Klondike, built for one hand: tap a card and it moves itself. Undo, auto-finish, and your best time saved.
• FreeCell — Every card face up from the start, so there's no luck left to blame. Four free cells and a clock.
• Spider Solitaire — One suit, ten columns, eight runs to build. Make an empty column early or you'll wish you had.
• Mahjong Solitaire — Match free tiles two at a time and dig the stack apart. Every board is dealt solvable.
• TriPeaks Solitaire — The quick one. Run cards up and down the ranks in one long chain — eight in a row is worth four times eight singles.

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