All of the mentioned games were played with Chinese dominoes, with one exception – Fifteen Lakes (Shi Wu Hu), which was also described for Chinese domino cards.
If there are no Chinese dominoes, there is no way to buy them, you don’t want to make them yourself, but you really want to try to play at least something, then there are certain adaptations for Western dominoes, or even playing cards.
Where necessary I’ve added the link to the Pagat website where you can find the games description.
Connecting games
The most famous Western domino games are also connecting games, so there are no adaptations of the actual Chinese connecting games. But you can try to take an ordinary domino and change the mechanics to an oriental one. That is deal all the tiles to the players (and keep the redundant dominoes out of play); if it is impossible to play, discard the tiles down; you can even try to play only in one direction. It is clear that the western set of dominoes, unlike the eastern one, is symmetrical, so the uniqueness of Chinese connecting games is lost.
Trick taking games
Tien Gow can actually be played with a regular 52-card deck of poker cards. In the red suits, which will be civilians, remove jacks and nines, and in the black suits, which will be military, take away all the cards below the nine, plus remove nine and Jack of clubs. Thus Heaven and Nines become Aces, Earth and Eights become Kings, Man and Sevens become Queens, and Harmony and Fives become Tens. The Jack of spades plays the role of [4:2] and the nine of spades plays the role of [2:1], together the Jack and nine of spades form the supreme pair. Next Tien Gow cards can be played without changing the rules, although, of course, the authenticity is lost.
Gambling gamees
There are at least two games that try to emulate the idea of Pai Gow. One is the Indonesian “QiuQiu“, which looks a lot like Pai Gow, but adds pure poker trading. The second is the patented “Twistem” game, which only remotely resembles Pai Gow, although it is clearly influenced by it.
Fishing games
There is an attempt to adapt the game Tsung Shap for Western dominoes called “Canton“. Canton gives more opportunities to the player, because the player has a certain number of domino tiles in his hands. But otherwise the principle of the game is very similar.
Solitaire games
No Chinese solitaire games are specifically transferred to European dominoes. Although if to use the 12-pairing (meaning dominoes form a pair of sum of their pips equals 12) some of the simpler solitaires can be played, such as Open the Pagoda or a Turtle. One can imagine own pairing system – for example additionally require individual pips to add to 6 (so [4:1] and [2:5] form a pair, but [4:1] and [3:4] does not, since 4+2=6 and 1+5=6, but 4+3 does not equal to 6) with some special rules for the tiles with 6 pips, but these are simply suggestions.
The more interesting games, such as Xiang Shi Fu would require to recreate the triplet system which is yet not done.
Collecting games
Since collecting games also exist in the West, there are some adaptations of Western card collecting games for domino sets. However, there is one game that was made under the influence of the Korean Jjak-mat-chu-gi game, called “Three Dozen“. The game is superior to the original in my opinion as most tiles can pair with more than one other tile. Whereas in Jjak-mat-chu-gi the ability to combine tiles into a combination is a too straightforward task.
Chinese Dominoes GuPai 