European-style dominoes are traditionally made of ivory, bone, or a dark hardwood such as ebony, with contrasting black or white pips (these can be in inlay or painted). Alternately, domino sets have been made from many different natural materials: stone, like marble, granite or soapstone; other hardwoods such as ash, oak, redwood and cedar; metals like brass or pewter; ceramic clay, or even frosted glass or crystal. These sets have a more novel look, and the often heavier weight makes them feel more substantial, but such materials and the resulting products are usually much more expensive than polymer materials.
Modern commercial domino sets are usually made of synthetic materials, such as ABS or polystyrene plastics, or Bakelite and other phenolic resins; many sets approximate the look and feel of ivory while others use colored or even translucent plastics to achieve a more contemporary look. Modern sets also commonly use a different color for the dots of each different end value (one-spots might have black pips while two-spots might be green, three red, etc.) to facilitate finding matching ends. Occasionally, one may find a domino set made of card stock like that for playing cards. Such sets are lightweight, compact and inexpensive, but like cards are more susceptible to minor disturbances such as a sudden breeze.
The traditional set of dominoes contains one unique piece for each possible combination of two ends with zero to six spots, and is known as a double-six set because the highest-value piece has six pips on each end (the "double six"). The spots from one to six are generally arranged as they are on six-sided dice, but because there are also blank ends having no spots there are seven possible faces, allowing 28 unique pieces in a double-six set.
However, this is a relatively small number especially when playing with more than four people, so many domino sets are "extended" by introducing ends with greater numbers of spots, which increases the number of unique combinations of ends and thus of pieces. Each progressively larger set increases the maximum number of pips on an end by three, so the common extended sets are double-nine, double-twelve, double-fifteen and double-eighteen. Larger sets such as double-twenty-one can theoretically exist but are rarely seen in retail stores, as identifying the number of pips on each domino becomes difficult, and a double-twenty-one set would have a staggering 253 pieces, far more than is normally necessary for most domino games even with eight players.
[edit] History
Domino pieces were historically carved from ivory or animal bone with small, round pips of inset ebony. The game's name comes from the pieces' resemblance to Venetian Carnival masks known as domini, which were white with black spots. These masks were so named, in turn, because they resembled French priests' winter hoods, being black on the outside and white on the inside. The name ultimately derives from the Latin dominus, meaning "lord" or "master."
The oldest domino sets have been dated from around 1120. Modern dominoes, as most of the Western world knows them, however, appear to be a Chinese invention. They were apparently derived from cubic dice, which had been introduced into China from India some time in the distant past. Each domino originally represented one of the 21 results of throwing two dice. One half of each domino is set with the pips from one die and the other half contains the pips from the second die. Chinese sets also introduce duplicates of some throws and divide the dominoes into two classes: military and civil. Chinese dominoes are also longer than typical European dominoes. Over time Chinese dominoes also evolved into the tile set used to play Mah Jong, a game which swept across the United States in the early to mid 1920s and has enjoyed moderate popularity, especially in its "solitaire" form, since that time.
The early 18th century witnessed dominoes making their way to Europe, making their first appearance in Italy. The game changed somewhat in the translation from Chinese to the European culture. European domino sets contain neither class distinctions nor the duplicates that went with them. Instead, European sets contain seven additional dominoes with six of these representing the values that result from throwing a single die with the other half of the tile left blank.
[edit] Tiles and rules
[edit] Tiles and suits
Bones are generally named for the number of dots on the two ends of the bone. A bone with a 2 on one end and a 5 on the other end is called the two - five, for example. Bones that have different numbers on the two ends are called singles or "blank" - number, and bones that have the same number on both ends are called doublets, doubles, or "double" - number.
Bones that share a common number of spots on one end are said to be of the same suit. In a double-six set, for example, 1–0, 1–1, 1–2, 1–3, 1–4, 1–5, and 1–6 all belong to the suit of one. All dominos, except for the doubles, belong to two suits. The 1–2, for example, belongs to the suit of one and the suit of two. All doubles belong to one suit only by this definition. An alternate definition of suit allows all dominoes to have two suits, by counting the set of all doublets as an additional suit.
[edit] Ranks
The value of each end of a bone is determined by the number of spots on the end, with zero (blank) being the lowest and six being the highest. The rank of a bone is determined by the combined number of pips on the two ends. This rank is sometimes referred to as the bone's weight so that a higher ranking bone is called a heavier bone while a lower ranking bone is called lighter.
[edit] Domino Sets
There are currently five major domino sets commercially available. They are Double Six, Double Nine, Double Twelve, Double Fifteen, and Double Eighteen, which is the largest commonly-available set. Here are the number of tiles and points (pips or spots) in each set.
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