Chinese Dominoes

Chinese Dominoes is a family of domino games played with "Chinese Dominoes" (or also called Asian Dominoes, as there are Chinese, Korean, Burmese, and Thai games played with these sets of Dominoes).

Origins

The Chinese name for 'Chinese Dominoes' is K'wat P'ai (meaning "bone tablets") or sometimes U P'ai ("Barbarian tablets)

As with a number of other Chinese games these dominoes made their way to Korea. The Korean version of dominoes are called kol-hpai (meaning "bone tablets") or sometimes ho-hpai ("Barbarian tablets") - possibly linked to the attitude of the korean nobility towards the game.

Components

Chinese Dominoes differ from Western Dominoes in the number and distribution of the tiles, as well as the games that are traditionally played with them.

A set consists of 32 tiles of a double-six pattern, distributed as follows:
Two copies of 1-1, 1-3, 1-5, 1-6, 2-2, 3-3, 4-4, 4-6, 5-5, 5-6 and 6-6.
One copy of 1-2, 1-4, 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, 2-6, 3-4, 3-5, 3-6 and 4-5.

These differ from Western Dominoes in that they have no blanks. The tiles are made up of the 21 different combinations of two six-sided dice thrown, plus the 11 "duplicate copies" listed above.

The pips for one and four are colored red. All other numbers are white, with the exception of six, which is half-and-half. These colors have significance in the Chinese games. Asian Dice have the one and four pips colored red as well.

Pai Gow and Tien Gow (Sky Nine) are popular games played with Chinese Dominoes.