Dominoes

Dominoes is a family of tile-based games played with rectangular tiles, each domino divided by a line into two square ends, every end marked with a number of spots, called pips, or left blank. The traditional European set holds 28 tiles carrying every combination of pips from zero to six, and players build a chain by matching tiles so that touching ends carry the same number of pips; larger extended sets, such as double-nine with 55 tiles and double-twelve with 91 tiles, serve bigger groups of players. The earliest known reference to dominoes appears in a Chinese text of the Song dynasty written by Zhou Mi between 1232 and 1298, but the modern game first appeared independently in France in the mid-18th century, with no confirmed link between the Chinese and European traditions; the name is thought to come from the black-and-white hooded domino costume worn at Venetian carnivals, which the black-spotted double-one tile resembled. From France the game spread quickly to Britain, Austria, Germany and Italy by the late 1700s, and it is played today at competitive levels, with organizations hosting world championships.