How to Play Dominoes: Rules, Setup, and Scoring

Learning how to play dominoes takes less time than dealing the tiles. Two to four players draw a hand from a shuffled set, then take turns matching the open end of the line with a tile from their own hand until someone empties their hand or no one can move. This page covers the standard double-six Draw and Block games — the two home rule sets you’re most likely to meet — and calls out where tournament or regional dominoes rules diverge.

Dominoes rules: how to play dominoes in a nutshell

This hub describes standard double-six Draw and Block dominoes, the way most home games in the US and UK are actually played when someone asks how to play dominoes. Where a tournament body or a regional house rule does something differently, that’s noted in the relevant section below rather than folded in as if it were the only way to play.

The set and the deal

A standard set has 28 tiles, one for every pairing of the numbers zero (shown as a blank half) through six, including each of the seven doubles. Larger groups, or games built around bigger hands like Mexican Train, use a double-nine set (55 tiles) or a double-twelve set (91 tiles) instead.

Shuffle the tiles face down and draw a hand: with two players, each draws seven tiles; with three or four players, each draws five. Whatever is left face down becomes the boneyard. To decide who leads, either draw one tile each and let the highest tile go first, or — a common house variant — hand the lead to whoever holds the highest double. The leader opens the game by placing any tile face up.

How a turn works

After the opening tile, the layout has two open ends — the exposed pip count at each end of the line. On your turn you lay a tile from your hand so that one of its halves touches an open end and shows the same number of pips, extending the line in that direction. A double is turned crosswise to the line it’s joining, but it still only extends in the same two directions as any other tile; it does not branch into a third direction the way it can in spinner variants.

The diagram below shows a double four-four placed crosswise with chains running out both sides of it. Reading outward from the double, each new tile’s touching half matches the pip count already exposed at that end of the line.

The draw game

Draw dominoes adds one rule on top of the basics: if you can’t match either open end with a tile from your hand, you must draw from the boneyard. Keep drawing, one tile at a time, until you draw something playable or the boneyard is down to its last two tiles — those two stay face down and untouched for the rest of the hand. Only once the boneyard can’t help you anymore do you pass.

Because the boneyard keeps feeding playable tiles back into the game, a hand of draw dominoes usually ends with someone going out rather than the layout blocking.

The block game

Block dominoes is the simpler of the two: there is no drawing mid-hand at all. Every tile not dealt into a hand just sits unused in the boneyard for the rest of the game. If you can’t match either open end, you say “pass” or knock and play moves on. When every player in turn can’t play, the layout is blocked and the hand ends immediately on the spot, without anyone going out.

Scoring

At the end of a hand, each player counts the pips remaining on the tiles still in their hand. If a player went out, their count is zero and they win the hand outright, scoring the total pips left in every other player’s hand. If the hand ended blocked instead, whoever has the lowest pip count in hand wins it, scoring the difference between their count and the sum of everyone else’s (ties at the lowest count usually mean nobody scores that hand).

Players agree on a target score before starting a game — casual tables often stop at 100, while tournament and federation play frequently runs to 150, 200, or 250 — and keep playing hands, reshuffling and redealing each time, until someone crosses it.

How a hand and a game end

A single hand ends one of two ways: someone plays their last tile (going out) or the layout is blocked with nobody able to move. Either way, score the hand as described above, gather in all the tiles, shuffle, and deal a fresh hand. A game is the full run of hands played until a player’s running total reaches the agreed target score.

Other dominoes games you will hear about

Draw and Block are the games most people mean by “dominoes,” but the same tiles get used for plenty of others. Mexican Train has each player building a personal branching line out from a shared center tile, usually with a double-twelve set and room for a big group. All Fives, also called Muggins, scores points mid-hand whenever the two open ends add up to a multiple of five. Chicken Foot forces the next three plays to fan out from any double before the line can continue normally. Matador breaks the matching rule entirely — touching halves have to add up to seven, with blanks acting as wild. Bergen is a quick two-to-four-player game that scores extra points for landing matching pips on both open ends at once. And 42, sometimes called Texas 42, turns dominoes into a trick-taking, card-game-style affair played in partnerships to a running score. None of these have their own rules hub here yet.

Common variations and house rules

Beyond Draw versus Block, expect small differences from table to table: who leads the first hand (drawing for the highest tile versus always giving it to the highest double), whether doubles can act as “spinners” that branch the line in a third direction (standard Draw and Block say no; games like Five Up and Chicken Foot say yes on purpose), and which target score ends the game. None of these affect the core matching rule — they just change what happens at the edges of a hand.