In the original 解八卦 (Jie Ba Gua). The game was invented by Ming FanXin, the Chinese Domino games enthusiast who helped me figuring out the rules of various games.
Eight tiles are laid out in a circle, and from the outside of the circle, next to each laid out tile, three more are placed perpendicular to it and all the tiles are turned over.
Compare with a picture of a classic trigram
A tile sandwiched between two others cannot be used in the game until at least one adjacent tile is removed. If all three adjacent tiles have already been played, only then can you use the tile they were perpendicular to.
From the tiles in the game, you need to collect either classic triplets or classic pairs. If there are no tiles left on the table at the end of the game, the points are doubled.
Points are awarded as follows:
- Full Dragon 6 points
- Five Sons 5 points
- Coincidence 4 points
- Split 3 points
- Big Dragon, Little Dragon and Two-Three-Kao – 3 points
- Five Points – 3 points
- Full Fourteen – 1 point
- A pair – 3 points
- The supreme pair – 9 points
Points for a pair are counted even if they are part of a triplet. For example, any Five Sons include a civil pair, so they actually count for 5+3=8 points. And the combination [2:1][4:2][4:4] will be worth all 12 points – 3 for the Five Points and 9 for the High Pair.
Chinese Dominoes GuPai 