The history of dominoes

Guides · Updated 1 October 2026

Dominoes began in China. The earliest written mention dates to the 12th century, during the Song dynasty, when tiles representing every throw of two dice were sold by street peddlers. The game reappeared in Europe in the 18th century, first recorded in France, with blanks added and the set reduced to the 28 tiles used today.

The history of dominoes is really two histories joined by a gap nobody has fully explained. The Chinese game and the European one share a name only in translation, look different on the table, and are played in completely different ways. Here is what is known about each, and where the record runs out.

Where did dominoes originate?

The oldest surviving reference comes from a writer named Zhou Mi, who lived from 1232 to 1298. In a book usually translated as Former Events in Wulin, he describes the city of Hangzhou and lists the goods sold there by peddlers during the reign of Emperor Xiaozong of Song, who ruled from 1162 to 1189. Alongside dice he names pupai, which translates roughly as gambling plaques or tiles.

That places dominoes in China by the late 12th century. It doesn’t tell us how much earlier they existed, and later claims of a much older origin are mostly legend. A manual of the game attributed to Qu You, who lived from 1341 to 1427, is sometimes cited as early evidence, but some scholars believe it is a later forgery.

The first dominoes were dice

The clearest way to understand Chinese dominoes is that each tile is a pair of dice laid flat. Throw two six-sided dice and there are 21 different results, from 1–1 up to 6–6. A Chinese domino set contains exactly those 21 patterns, and nothing else: there are no blanks, because a die has no blank face.

But a traditional set has 32 tiles, not 21. Eleven of the patterns appear twice and form what is called the civil suit, 22 tiles in all, including the 6–6, 1–1 and 4–4. The other ten appear once and form the military suit. The set even kept the colouring of Chinese dice, where the one and the four are marked in red.

These were not games of matching ends. Chinese dominoes were, and still are, used mostly for trick-taking and gambling games such as Tien Gow and Pai Gow, closer in spirit to cards than to anything a Western player would recognise as dominoes. The tiles look different too: traditional ones were cut from ebony, long and narrow, about 67 millimetres by 22.

How dominoes reached Europe

This is where the trail goes cold. Nobody knows how the idea travelled from China to Europe, or whether it travelled at all rather than being reinvented. One common suggestion is that Italian missionaries in China brought it back, but there is no documentary evidence for it.

What is documented is that modern dominoes appeared in France in the middle of the 18th century. The name first turns up in print in 1762, in the French magazine L’Avantcoureur, and the 1771 edition of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux is the first dictionary to record “domino” as the name of a game. From France it spread quickly to Britain, Austria, southern Germany and Italy. Many popular histories say Italy came first, and Venice and Naples are often named, but the firm early records are French.

England had the game by the late 1700s. The story usually told is that French prisoners of war brought it with them, though that is hard to confirm. European sets were commonly made of bone or ivory, which is where two names still in use come from: dominoes are often called bones, and the pile you draw from is the boneyard.

Where the name “domino” comes from

The most likely source is a costume. A domino was a hooded robe worn with a mask at the Venetian Carnival, and the game probably took its name from the resemblance. The double-one makes the case best: two spots set side by side, like the eye holes of a domino mask.

So the Italian connection may live on in the word even if the earliest records of the game are French: a game named after a Venetian costume, first written down in Paris.

What changed on the way

The European set was not a copy of the Chinese one. It was a redesign, and three changes made it a different object entirely.

The blanks are the important change. They added a seventh number, zero, and together with dropping the duplicates they produced the tidy structure that makes the Western game work: seven numbers, each paired with every number including itself exactly once, for 28 tiles. Every number now appears on exactly seven tiles, which is what lets a player count what is left. In the Chinese set, with its doubled patterns, some numbers appear far more often than others. The guide to how many dominoes are in a set shows why that arithmetic matters so much.

Dominoes in the last two centuries

Once it had the 28-tile set, Europe did what it had done with cards: it invented games. Block and Draw are the simplest, and the foundation most of the others build on. Scoring games arrived too, including All Fives, whose rules were published in 1864, and Fives and Threes, which became a fixture of British pubs. Other games altered the rules more radically, like Matador, where tiles must add up to seven rather than match.

The game kept moving. In the Americas it put down deep roots, particularly across the Caribbean and Latin America, where four-player partnership games are common, and in Texas, where the trick-taking game 42 was invented in 1887 and in 2011 became the official State Domino Game. Larger sets arrived for bigger groups, and with them the modern party games Mexican Train and Chicken Foot. The guide to types of domino games covers how each of these plays.

The tiles gave English a phrase along the way. Stand dominoes on end in a row, tip the first, and the rest fall in sequence; by the 20th century the “domino effect” had become shorthand for any chain reaction, famously applied to politics by President Eisenhower in 1954.

Are Chinese and Western dominoes the same game?

No. They share an idea, a flat tile showing two numbers, but little else. Chinese sets are built from dice results, have 32 tiles with duplicates and no blanks, and are played mostly as trick-taking games. Western sets have 28 unique tiles including blanks, and most Western games are about matching the numbers at the open ends of a line. If you learned one, you would have to learn the other from scratch.

The Western game is the one you can play here, in both its oldest forms: Block and Draw. The dominoes glossary explains the vocabulary that two centuries of play have left behind.