Designed by Des
Designed by Des for Stellar Whiskers.
Domino Shapes is dominoes with pictures instead of dots. Each half of a tile shows one of twelve shapes, from a circle and a star to a reindeer, a gingerbread house and a snowflake, plus a blank. You match shapes instead of counting dots, so it's easy to read at a glance and kind to anyone who finds counting pips tiring.
The oldest dominoes we know of come from China, where they were written about by the 1200s. Chinese tiles were made to show every throw of two dice, so they had no blanks. Dominoes reached Italy and France in the 1700s, and the European sets added blank halves. A "double-six" set of 28 tiles became the usual one.
The game here is the simplest Western game, the block game: match an open end or draw, and the first to play every tile wins. Domino Shapes uses a bigger "double-eleven" set of 78 tiles, one for every pair of its twelve faces.