Sources

We are now in the middle of the Chinese dominoes games description and next will come the games, the rules for which have been recreated with some difficulties. Therefore, I want to explain a little about the sources and at the same time explain who Culin is, who will be mentioned more often from now on.

So where did I get the rules for all these games?

I’ll start with the fact that two games, Pai Gow and Tien Gow, are still actively played today, so there are a lot of references to them. There are no problems with information about these games. With all the other games it is more difficult. Even with the game “Ding Niu”, which is still actively played, but only in China and only by the older generation.

One of the most important sources is Stewart Culin’s book “Chinese Games With Dice and Dominoes“, written in the distant nineteenth century. Culin mostly described the games played by Chinese immigrants in the United States. This is why when transliterating game names he uses Cantonese, which is a variant of Chinese language common among immigrants, and not Mandarin, which is the official language of China. Culin did not provide original Chinese names, so I found them from other resources.

Culin described a little less than half of all currently known games with Chinese dominoes. Unfortunately, his descriptions are sometimes erroneous or not fully understood. Broken rules of some games has been proven by running computer simulations – for example, the Korean collecting game Jjak-mat-chu-gi in about 90% of cases ends in a draw. Some games somewhat broke the usual stereotypes for games – for example, another collecting game allowed you to make two moves at a time, which is more typical for fishing games. Maybe that’s how they really played, but given that Culin was sometimes wrong, it’s not for sure. In some games Culin indicated one number of dominoes and pictured another, such was the case with the Turtle solitaire. But probably the most confusing description was that of the game Barbarian Tables (Ho-hpai), where the text is so complicated that other sites usually just copy it without changes, hoping that someone will understand the rules.

With all the shortcomings of this book, there is invaluable information that could not be found elsewhere, some games are described normally, and by using logic, you can guess the rules of other games. Therefore, we greatly thank Culin and move on.

Many English language sites with domino rules simply copy the rules described by Culin, without even editing them. A nice exception is pagat.com, which specializes more in cards but has a section for dominoes. The author of the site, John McLeod, is concerned about the fate of the games listed there. And although he doesn’t always check the rules by playing them personally (and if you look at how many games there are, it’s not surprising), he definitely thinks about difficult points and listens to his readers. It lists only those games from Culin’s book that can be deciphered. Therefore as of time of this writing the Barbarian Tablets game is not there, for example.

Actually this site was my main entry point for Chinese domino games. There are only those games from Culin that are playable, but there are also additional ones from other sources (some of them I helped to find). Note that Pagat website rarely theorize. That is, there is no such thing as “here are the rules, I don’t know exactly how to play according to them, but probably so.” It’s good in terms of correctness, it’s not so good in terms of informativeness. Fortunately, we had an active correspondence with John, and he shared with me those games, the rules of which he could not fully decipher. I, in turn, shared with him translations of games from the Chinese Internet.

So we smoothly moved on to the next sources. It is clear that one of the sources about Chinese games is the Chinese Wikipedia. To my great surprise, in the Chinese Wikipedia, on the most obvious resource, there were games whose rules were completely absent on the English-speaking Internet – Xiang Shi Fu and Guo Wu Guan. Now this has been fixed and these games have appeared on Pagat, but after that I started digging deeper in the Chinese internet. In addition, Wikipedia described connection games that were only partially present on the English-speaking Internet. Since Wikipedia is blocked in mainland China, I had to use the Chinese resource BaiDu, which is the Chinese equivalent of Wikipedia. There I found more detailed rules of the game “Ding Niu”. Unfortunately, the rules laid out there are not always completely clear either. And the problem is not my poor knowledge of Chinese – I let the Chinese read these rules and they said that it was written very confusingly.

In defence of Culin and Chinese resources, I will say that describing the rules of the game is actually quite difficult. That is why they are so confusing. Some things can be accidentally omitted, some detail may not be specified, and your advice in the game may be taken as a rule.

I also translated from Portuguese some of the rules from a book about gaming in Macau (Jogos, brinquedos e outras diversões populares de Macau) kindly provided to me by John McLeod. There were few original rules, mostly a copy from Culin, and perhaps the only game that was actually unique to this book was Da Ling, or Playing Zeroes. The Tau Ngau game was also described there, but with slightly different calculations than on the Pagat website.

I once delved deeply into Chinese blogs on blog.sina.com.cn, but unfortunately, these blogs are now unavailable for unknown reasons. One of these blogs was located here: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1654037892. It is possible that this is a temporary technical problem and someday this blog will be up and running again. I have read the rules of some solitaire games and Little Mahjong from these blogs.

I found an email on one of these Chinese blogs, wrote there, and to my surprise, I got a reply. This is how my correspondence with Mr. Ming FanXin (闵凡信) began, who explained to me many points that were unclear to me, including the games that were described in Wikipedia. In addition, he shared with me the rules of some other games, such as “Moving Mice” or “Eight Trigrams”.

I also looked for Chinese videos of people playing dominoes. There I saw real-life examples of playing Ding Niu or Tien Gow, with the latter game often being played by rules other than the standard ones. I called this game “Folk Tien Gow” because this game doesn’t really have a name. Players simply call it “domino”.

These are not all resources, there were separate answers on the forums, or blog posts dedicated to one game. I try to cite sources on the relevant pages.

While not technically a source of itself, but you might find it helpful to check the Java code which I used to simulate the rules and check how the various games could be played and what were their shortcomings and whether the rules were not broken: https://github.com/navpil/gupai