TileTally
The Journal
How to Play Block Dominoes: Complete Rules for Beginners
The classic domino game, start to finish — set-up, drawing a hand, making a legal move, and how a round ends, with a worked example round and the vocabulary every player picks up eventually.
Domino Scoring Explained: Draw, Block, and the "Fives" Variant
How points are actually counted in dominoes — the standard block/draw scoring rule, the blocked-game tiebreaker, and the popular 'fives' scoring variant, with worked examples run through the real scorekeeping function.
Mahjong Tiles 101: What Every Suit and Honor Tile Means
A plain-language tour of a standard mahjong set — the three suits, the honor tiles, the bonus tiles, and how the full 144-tile count adds up, tile group by tile group.
Mexican Train vs. Chicken Foot: Two Domino Games Compared
Both games use a double-twelve set and branching layouts, but the rules diverge fast. A side-by-side look at set-up, the hub, and how a round actually plays out, with real numbers for set size and hand math.
How to Run a Family Domino Tournament Night
A practical playbook for turning a stack of domino sets and a few hours into an organized, single-elimination tournament everyone can follow, with a worked bracket for an odd-sized field.
The Math Behind a Double-Six Domino Set (Why There Are 28 Tiles)
A double-six domino set always has exactly 28 tiles. Here's the combinatorics behind that number, how it generalizes to double-nine, double-twelve, and beyond, and the related formula for a set's total pip value.
Caring for an Antique or Bone Domino Set
Bone, ivory, ebony, and early Bakelite domino sets need different handling than a modern plastic set. A practical guide to identifying the material, cleaning, storing, and preserving one, and confirming it's complete.
Double-Six, Double-Nine, or Double-Twelve? Choosing the Right Set Size
Every domino set follows the same (n+1)(n+2)/2 formula, but the practical differences between sizes — player count, portability, score swings, even the odds of a doubles-heavy hand — are what should actually decide which one to buy.
Reading the Boneyard: What's Probably Still Out There
You can't see the boneyard or your opponents' hands, but the hypergeometric math behind a domino draw tells you exactly how likely a given number is to still be buried — read as game strategy, never as a wager.
Domino Draw Odds, Done Properly: The Hypergeometric Math
Drawing a domino hand is sampling without replacement, not a series of independent trials — which means the right model is the hypergeometric distribution, not a binomial shortcut. Here's the full math, with a worked table and a side-by-side comparison showing exactly how much the shortcut gets wrong.
Muggins and Five-Up Scoring vs. Block Game Scoring
Block and draw dominoes score once, at the end of a round. Muggins and Five-Up score constantly, mid-play, whenever the open ends sum to a multiple of five. They're different games wearing the same tiles — here's exactly how they diverge.
Mexican Train Conventions: The Engine, Personal Trains, and Doubles
A closer look at just Mexican Train's own conventions — choosing and using the engine, marking a train open or closed, how doubles are commonly handled, and the descending-engine match structure many groups play a full session around.