There exists such thing as a Chinese domino. And it differs from the European one in appearance, composition, rules, and culture. In general – in everything. Chinese dominoes, or GuPai (骨牌), translated as bone tablets, is an ancient game that was once brought to Europe, where it changed and gave rise to our familiar European dominoes. In Korea, it was called Golpae (골패). Unlike European dominoes, GuPai has much more symbolism. We can say that almost every tile has its own personality. And this is not some kind of mysticism, but the properties of the GuPai deck itself, which is asymmetrical in nature.
The games themselves are much more diverse than European dominoes. And in these games, the domino tiles may combine into different combinations, which gives the GuPai deck more depth. Compared to Chinese dominoes, European dominoes are very rational and logical. Chinese is more irrational and, so to speak, artistic. GuPai is difficult to understand at first, but as soon as the habit appears, you can see all its beauty. These words may sound strange to a person who is only familiar with European dominoes. Perhaps the distant analogy of poker cards and tarot cards can explain my point. Poker cards are like European dominoes. And tarot cards are like Chinese dominoes. By the way, Chinese dominoes were really used for fortune-telling. But here I will mainly focus on casual games. Some of them do not require any symbolism, although, no matter what, the asymmetry of the deck is always lurking.
Unfortunately at its homeland Chinese dominoes have significantly lost ground. In China, it was supplanted by the visually more attractive Mahjong (麻将), and in Korea by the flower cards of Hwatu (화투). Unlike Mahjong and Hwatu, GuPai is more versatile and allows you to play a larger number of games. But, on the other hand, it is not so visually clear and bright and requires a certain habit. And the GuPai culture began to die out.
The Chinese domino has not completely disappeared. Now the older generation of Chinese people play a limited number of games, such as Tien Gow and Ding Niu. And the most common game is a gambling Pay Gow, which is played in casinos. It was thanks to the existence of Pai Gow that I was able to purchase a deck of Chinese dominoes. But the problem of extinction of GuPai culture remains. Young people are not interested in the rules of games that older Chinese still play. As for Pai Gow, casinos are prohibited in mainland China, and Pai Gow is too complicated for Europeans to casually play. GuPai positions will continue to weaken.
I was sufficiently intrigued by GuPai to delve deeper into it. There is an old American book that describes several Chinese domino games that are barely mentioned in contemporary Chinese sources. And in Chinese sources there are descriptions of games that are practically unknown on the English-speaking Internet. I have combined information from various sources. Unfortunately, the rules are not always well described, and it is difficult to reproduce games.
In order to reproduce the rules of some games, I wrote a computer simulator of GuPai and checked the disputed points. It’s open source here: https://github.com/navpil/gupai (it’s not a computer game, it’s just a working code that lets me experiment with the rules). When developing this simulator, I searched all possible resources, translated texts from Korean and Chinese, watched videos where older people play dominoes, sometimes viewed videos frame by frame. In the process, I was able to organise the knowledge of Chinese dominoes and also found and verified the rules of almost all GuPai games that can be found in open (and sometimes even closed) access. There are still moments that I do not understand, and I will indicate it where needed.
Chinese Dominoes GuPai 