42 learntoplay42.com

The Texas domino game

Learn to
play 42

Four players, twenty-eight bones, seven tricks, and thirty-five points of count. A name that comes straight out of the arithmetic, and a game you can learn in an afternoon and lose to your grandmother at for the rest of your life.

The five counting dominoes

10
10
5
5
5

35 points of count  +  7 tricks at a point apiece  =  42

Start with the rules About ten minutes to read.

What's here

In the order that works

01 · Rules

How a hand is played

The deal, the bid, trump, following suit, and how the 42 points get divided.

 02 · Bidding

What your hand is worth

Counting trumps and boss offs, three worked examples, and when to just pass.

 03 · A hand

Thirty bid, thirty-six made

All four hands face up, seven tricks played out, with the reasoning at each step.

 04 · Contracts

Nel-O, Sevens, Plunge, Splash

The bids above 42, and an honest account of how much they vary by table.

 05 · Glossary

What they're saying

Bones, count, boss, sluff, set, marks. The vocabulary nobody stops to explain.

The one thing to understand

Every domino belongs to two suits

That's the hurdle for anyone coming from cards, and everything else in 42 follows from it. A domino has two ends and each end is a suit, so which suit a tile counts as depends on what was led and what's trump.

Call fives and this is a trump. Call deuces and it's a deuce. Call sixes and it's neither: a tile you can only throw away. One domino, three different values, decided before anyone plays.

Garner, Texas · 1880s

Invented because cards were forbidden

The story usually told is that two boys in Garner, Texas were caught playing cards and punished for it by their Baptist families, so they built a card-style trick-taking game out of dominoes, which nobody had thought to ban. It spread across the state from there.

Texas later named it the official State Domino Game. The state championship has been played in Hallettsville for decades, and in most of East Texas you're never far from a table.