Mexican Train With a Double-Nine Set

Plenty of households own a double-nine set rather than a double-twelve, and Mexican Train plays perfectly well with one. It is a shorter, lighter game. Here is what changes.

What is in the set

	Double-nine	Double-twelve
Tiles	55	91
Highest tile	9-9, worth 18	12-12, worth 24
Doubles	10 (0-0 to 9-9)	13 (0-0 to 12-12)
Rounds in a full game	10	13
Total pips in the set	495	1,092

Nearly half the tiles, and less than half the pips. That is the whole difference in a nutshell: shorter rounds, smaller scores, and a game that finishes.

How many tiles each

With only 55 tiles you cannot deal 15 apiece to four people and still have a workable boneyard. The usual deals:

Players	Dominoes each	Left in the boneyard
2	15	25
3-4	10	25 or 15
5-6	8	15 or 7
7-8	7	6 or… not really

Which points at the real limitation. A double-nine set stretches to about six players before the boneyard is too thin to draw from and rounds start blocking constantly. With seven or eight, use a double-twelve.

How it plays differently

• Rounds are quicker. Fewer tiles in hand and fewer numbers in play; hands empty faster.
• Scores are smaller. The worst tile is 18 rather than 24, and a bad hand is proportionally cheaper — so one disastrous round is less likely to settle the whole game.
• Blocking is more common. A shallower boneyard means the draw runs out sooner.
• Numbers repeat more. With ten numbers rather than thirteen, matches come up more often. Easier for beginners, and less tense at the end.

None of the rules change. Doubles, trains, the shared train and the scoring all work exactly as they do with a double-twelve set — see how to play Mexican Train.

Scoring with a double-nine set

Identical in method, smaller in scale. When a round ends you count the pips still in your hand, the winner scores nothing, and the totals carry forward. What changes is the arithmetic: a full double-nine set holds 495 pips against the double-twelve’s 1,092, so a bad round costs roughly half as much.

That has a real effect on how a game feels. With a double-twelve set, being caught once with the 12-12 and the 12-11 is 47 points and can decide the evening. With a double-nine the worst pair in the game is 18 and 17 — still bad, still not fatal. Games stay closer, and a player who falls behind early has a genuine route back.

The double blank is worth nothing under either set, so if your family plays a penalty for it, that convention carries over unchanged. It is worth agreeing before you deal — see the double blank rule.

Which set to buy

If you are choosing: double-twelve is the standard for Mexican Train and handles up to eight players, which is what the game is really built for. A double-nine is cheaper, the tiles are often larger for the same box size, and it suits a smaller group or a shorter evening. Neither is wrong.

One practical note if anyone at your table has trouble reading the tiles: a double-nine set has the same number of dots crammed into fewer values, so the pips are usually printed larger. For a group who find a double-twelve fiddly, that alone can be the deciding factor.

What this site uses

Being clear about this, because it is the obvious question: the online game always uses a double-twelve set — 91 tiles, numbers up to 12. There is no double-nine option, and there is no setting that removes the 10s, 11s and 12s.

What you can do is start the game at a lower double. Beginning at the 9-9 gives you ten rounds, the same number a full double-nine game has, and finishes in about the same time. The tiles still run up to 12, so it is not the same game — but if what you actually wanted was “shorter than thirteen rounds”, that is the setting that does it, and it goes down as far as you like.

Keep reading

• How to play Mexican Train
• Setting up a round: tiles, hands and the engine
• Chicken Foot dominoes
• Playing with a big group