Mexican Train on Your Phone

Mexican Train works on a phone, and a good number of people play on nothing else. There is no app to install — it runs in Safari or Chrome, the same as everything else you open. A phone screen is small for a game with up to nine trains on the table, so the board is laid out differently there. Here is how it works and how to make it comfortable.

Getting started

Open Safari on an iPhone, or Chrome on an Android phone, go to mexicantrain.online, and sign in. That is the setup — nothing to download, nothing to install, nothing taking up space.

You play by tapping: tap a domino in your hand to pick it up, then tap the spot where it goes. Nothing needs to be dragged, which is the part that usually goes wrong on a small screen.

How the board fits a small screen

On a phone you look at one train at a time rather than the whole table at once. There are arrow buttons at the bottom left and right to move between them: your train, each other player’s, and the Mexican Train.

The clever part is what the arrows tell you. When it becomes somebody’s turn and their train is off to one side, the arrow on that side picks up a label with their name — so you always know whose go it is and which way to swipe to watch, without hunting.

Trains get long. A train scrolls up and down, and it opens at the newest end, which is the end you care about. If you scroll back to look at how a train started, a small ↓ button appears to drop you back to the live end.

Your hand

Your dominoes sit along the bottom of the screen, and you can arrange them in whatever order suits you — many people group them by number. On the narrowest phones, dragging is replaced by small left and right arrows on the tile you are holding, because dragging on a 5-inch screen is fiddly and mistakes are annoying. Either way, the arrangement is remembered.

Two settings make a real difference here. Element Size scales the whole board, dominoes included, so if the tiles feel small you can make them larger. And Add colors to tiles gives each number its own strong colour, which is far quicker to read at a glance on a phone than counting pips.

Add it to your home screen

Worth doing. Afterwards it opens from an icon, full-screen, with no browser bar — which on a phone is a noticeable amount of extra board.

iPhone (Safari)

1. Open mexicantrain.online in Safari. It has to be Safari — Chrome on an iPhone cannot do this.
2. Tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen — the square with an arrow coming out of it.
3. Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
4. Tap Add at the top right.

Android (Chrome)

1. Open mexicantrain.online in Chrome.
2. Tap the three dots menu at the top right.
3. Tap Add to Home screen, or Install app if that is what it offers.
4. Confirm the name and tap Add.

You stay signed in, so from then on it is one tap from your home screen into your game.

Playing on a phone while you are doing other things

This is what phones are good for here. There is no turn clock — the game will not pass for you, will not drop you for being slow, and will not expire — so a round can happen across an afternoon in the gaps between other things.

The thing to know before you rely on it: there is no email telling you it is your turn. You can allow browser notifications and leave the tab open, and many groups instead keep a group chat going and say “your go, Dad” in it. Either works; assuming the game will chase you does not.

It does need a connection, since this is a live game with other people — there is no offline mode. There is no video and nothing large to download, so it is not a heavy thing to run on mobile data, but it does need to be online.

Everyone can be on something different

You on a phone, your sister on a laptop, your mother on an iPad: it is the same game at the same time for all three, and nobody has to match anybody. That is a browser thing, and it is the main practical reason the game is one. The tablet page and the computer page cover the other two.

If some of your group has never played, how to play Mexican Train explains the game, and the board refuses illegal moves anyway — so nobody can break anything while they learn.

Keep reading

• Playing on an iPad or tablet
• Nothing to download, nothing to install
• Playing with friends and family
• How playing online works