Dominoes / Strategy
How partnership dominoes changes the way you play
In partnership dominoes you are not playing your seven tiles. You are playing fourteen: yours and your partner's. That changes almost every decision. Your partner's first tile tells you what they are strong in, and your job is usually to keep that number on the table rather than spend your own best tile. Each of the four seats has a different job. And everything you tell your partner has to travel through the tiles you play, in whatever way your table allows.
The setup
Four players, two fixed teams, partners sitting opposite each other. A double-six set of 28 tiles is dealt out completely, seven each, so there is no boneyard and every tile is in someone's hand. Play normally runs anticlockwise. That much is common to the Latin American partnership game and Jamaican partner dominoes, as John McLeod records them at pagat.com.
Who leads differs. In Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela, and in Jamaican partner play, the holder of [6-6] opens the first hand with it. Under the rules pagat gives for the federation game (FID), the first leader is chosen by drawing tiles and may lead anything. In later hands, Mexican and Colombian rules give the lead to the winner of the last hand; in Jamaica the winning team leads, and its two players may agree which of them poses, without saying what they hold.
What a hand is worth also differs — pips to 100 or 200 in the Latin American games, one point a hand to six-love in Jamaica. The guide to domino scoring covers those systems. Here the subject is how to play once the tiles are down.
Four seats, four jobs
A Spanish-language guide to partnership play, built on Ignacio Zaibert's book Conceptos y criterios del dominó por parejas, describes each seat's job in plain terms. It is a useful frame for any table:
| Seat | Plays | Main job |
|---|---|---|
| Leader | 1st | Plays their own hand, unless it is very poor |
| First opponent | 2nd | Attacks the leader's number and stops the partner supporting it |
| Leader's partner | 3rd | Protects the leader: keeps their number open, closes what hurts them |
| Second opponent | 4th | Tries to make the leader pass |
The point of the table is that only one player in four is mainly playing their own hand. If your partner led, you are the support. Your strong suit matters less than theirs this hand, and a beginner who plays for their own seven tiles from the third seat is often helping the opponents.
Reading your partner's lead
Pagat's advice is direct: in a partnership game, assume your partner's lead is their strongest suit and play to it. The same page says the best lead is your strongest suit, preferably with a double, because it gives you more ways to follow and tells your partner what to play to.
A worked example. Your partner leads [5-5]. The first opponent plays [5-2], so the ends show a five and a two. You hold:
[2-6] [5-0] [6-6] [3-1] [4-0] [2-3] [1-1]
Count the fives first. There are seven: [5-5] and [5-2] are down, and you hold [5-0]. That leaves four unseen — [5-1], [5-3], [5-4] and [5-6] — spread across your partner and the two opponents. A partner who led the double probably holds two or three of them.
You have three legal plays:
- [5-0] on the five. The ends become two and blank. You have just closed your partner's number with your only five. This is the mistake.
- [2-3] on the two. The ends become five and three. Your partner's five stays open, but you have opened threes, where you hold only [3-1].
- [2-6] on the two. The ends become five and six. The five stays open for your partner, and you open sixes, where you hold [6-6] — a double that can only ever be played on a six. If sixes never open, that double stays in your hand.
[2-6] is the play. It protects your partner and solves your own problem in the same move.
Keep [5-0] in hand. It is your one way to answer a five later, and if the second opponent covers the five end, you may be the only person able to bring fives back for your partner.
Close what hurts your partner
Support works in both directions. Keeping your partner's number open is half of it; the other half is shutting down numbers that are bad for them.
If your partner passes, you know exactly what they lack: they hold neither number showing on the ends. In a full-deal game that is certain, not a guess. From then on, every time one of those numbers reappears on an end, your partner is likely to knock again. Where you can, cover it.
The Zaibert-based guide adds a quieter version of the same idea: if your partner has played a tile that shuts a number down, do not open that number yourself. They closed it for a reason. The article on reading play covers counting and passes in more depth.
The beginner mistake: your best tile, too early
New partnership players tend to play the way they would in a two-player game: lead with strength, follow with strength, get rid of the big tiles. With a partner, that wastes tiles.
Your strongest tiles are the ones that can answer when nobody else at the table can. Spend them on turn one or two, while your partner still has plenty of their own number, and you have nothing left for the turn when the ends go against your team. Pagat's version of this is about control: the better you control a suit, the more you should try to leave it on the ends, rather than playing it out.
The second version of the mistake is fighting your partner for the lead. If you both open your own suits, the opponents get to choose which end to attack, and neither of you gets a run.
When your hand is bad
Some hands are weak however you play them. The guide's advice is to limit the damage and hand the game to your partner. You still have seven tiles of the team's fourteen; use them to keep your partner's number alive and close the opponents' numbers, even if you never get a run of your own.
How much a bad hand costs depends on how your table scores. In the pip-scored Latin American games, heavy tiles stuck in your hand count against the team, so there is a reason to shed them. In Jamaican partner play a won hand is usually one point however many pips remain, so control matters more than weight. Pips also decide blocked games, and traditions disagree on whether a team's total or a single player's count decides those.
Signalling within the rules
This is where tables disagree most, and where arguments start.
- Jamaican partner play, per pagat: no talking about your tiles and no gestures. You may not say what you hold or what you want played. But hesitation is fair to read: pausing suggests you had a choice, playing at once suggests only one tile fitted.
- Spanish-language partnership guides treat the pensada — how long you think before playing — as the main way to inform your partner. Play quickly when you hold one tile of the number you are blocking; take longer when you hold two or more. The Zaibert-based guide also suggests partners agree in advance which tile they usually lead with, where the rules permit.
- Some other Caribbean tables allow agreed hand gestures during play to show strength in the number on the end. Pagat notes that some championships ban them and some partners choose to play without.
None of these is wrong. They are different games played under the same name. Agree on it before the first tile, and if you sit down at a new table, ask.
Whatever the local rule, your plays always talk. Leading a number says you are strong in it. Covering your partner's number says you could not or would not help. Playing on the other end says you are keeping it open for them.
Something to try tonight
Next time your partner leads, before you look at your own options, say to yourself which number they led and how many of its seven tiles you can see. Then choose the play that keeps that number on an end. Do it for a whole evening, even when it feels slow, and keep an eye on which team is doing most of the knocking.