Dominoes
By Frank Force · MIT license. Source · All credits
About Dominoes
Classic block dominoes against the computer. Your hand sits along the bottom and the tiles you can legally play are the ones lit up, so you are never hunting for a move that does not exist. First to shed every tile wins the round.
How to play
Tap a tile in your hand, then pick which end of the line to add it to.
Rules of Dominoes
- This is block dominoes with a double-six set, which is twenty-eight tiles from double blank up to double six.
- Each player draws seven tiles. The rest stay face down and are not drawn from during play, which is what makes it block rather than draw dominoes.
- The player holding the highest double normally opens. After that, players alternate.
- A tile may be added to either end of the line if one of its halves matches the number showing at that end. A double is laid crossways but still counts as its single number.
- If you cannot match either end, you pass and play moves on.
- The round ends when a player lays their last tile, or when neither player can move.
- The winner is whoever runs out first. If the game blocks with tiles still in hand, the player with the lower total pip count wins the round.
Controls
- Tap a domino in your rack
- Tap the end of the line where you want it
What makes it worth playing
- Block dominoes against the computer
- Match the number at either end of the line
- Your rack stays visible along the bottom
- Pass when nothing in your hand fits either end
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-08-26.
Tips from playing it
- Play your doubles early. They are the hardest tiles to get rid of later.
- Watch which number your opponent keeps passing on and keep that end open.
- Hold a tile with a number you have several of. It keeps your options open.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
Picked from the MIT-licensed LittleJS Arcade by Frank Force after checking the licence at source rather than trusting the repository label, and after confirming the game makes no requests to any other site. We host it on our own servers, so it loads straight into the game with no third-party ad code and no pre-roll video. We played it through on a real phone-sized screen on 2026-08-26 before publishing this page, and the screenshots above are from that session rather than from the original project. One thing worth saying about the opponent, because we went and read how it works: it does not cheat. It runs a perfect-information Monte Carlo search, dealing itself thirty plausible versions of your hidden hand and picking the tile that does best across all of them. The only things it is ever allowed to look at are its own tiles, the chain on the table and how many tiles you are holding. It never sees your actual hand, which is why it can be beaten by holding back a tile it has no reason to expect.
More on how we pick and fix these: what we changed in the open-source games and how we test a game.
We wrote about this one
- An opponent that cannot see your hand. Everyone assumes the computer cheats at dominoes. Ours guesses your hand thirty times a turn instead, and the way it guesses is exactly the gap you can play into.
- Category
- Board
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Portrait
- Players
- One player against the computer.
- Difficulty
- Easy to play, more tactical than it looks
- Typical session
- 5 to 10 minutes a game
- Last tested by us
- 2026-08-26
- Created by
- Frank Force (MIT)
