How to Win at Mexican Train

Mexican Train has more luck in it than chess and more skill in it than snakes and ladders. You cannot win a round you were dealt out of, but over a whole game the same people keep finishing near the bottom of the scoreboard, and it is not an accident. Here is what they are doing.

You are not trying to go out. You are trying to score nothing

This is the shift that turns an average player into a good one. Going out is one way to score nothing, and it is the showy one, but it is not the goal. The goal is to never be caught holding much.

A player who goes out twice in a game and gets caught with 12-12 and 11-9 in the others will lose to somebody who never went out at all but was never holding more than eight points. Play for the small hand, not the finish.

Shed the heavy tiles first

A 12-11 is worth twenty-three points; a 2-1 is worth three. If you are choosing between two legal plays and one gets rid of a heavy tile, play the heavy one almost every time. Early in a round there are lots of open ends and it is easy; late on there are few, and the heavy tiles are exactly the ones still stuck in your hand.

The common mistake is playing the tile that fits most neatly, or that keeps your own train tidy. Neither of those things scores anything.

Count what is left, roughly

You do not need to memorise the set. But there are thirteen of each number in a double-12 set, and if you have seen most of the nines go by, a 9-9 in your hand is turning into a problem. Noticing that four turns earlier than everyone else is most of what "good at dominoes" means.

Doubles: play them early

A double is a heavy tile that is also hard to place, and under the usual rules you have to be able to cover it yourself or your train opens up. Both of those get worse as the round goes on and the open ends dry up.

So when you can play a double and cover it from your own hand, that is usually the moment. Holding it for a better opportunity mostly means holding it until there is no opportunity at all.

Opening your own train on purpose

Your train opening up is normally something that happens to you. Occasionally it is worth doing deliberately.

If your hand is full of one number and your own train is the only place you can play it, closing your train off strands you. Leaving it open means other people play there — which advances it, changes the end number, and can hand you exactly the match you needed. It also, of course, gives everybody else somewhere convenient to dump. Judge it by whether you are the one who is stuck.

The endgame

Once hands get short, the game changes character. Two things matter:

• Watch who is nearly out. The number of tiles each player holds is visible. When somebody is down to one or two, stop playing for position and start dumping your heaviest tiles anywhere legal — the round may end on the next turn and you want to be holding as little as possible when it does.
• Watch the boneyard. When it empties, no one can draw, which means a train that goes dead stays dead and a round can block suddenly. If you are sitting on high tiles at that point, get rid of them while there are still ends to play on.

The double blank, if it is worth 50

If your table plays a penalty, the 0-0 stops being a curiosity and becomes the most important tile in your hand. Play it at the first legal opportunity, even if the play is otherwise poor. Fifty points is more than a whole bad hand.

And if you are new to the game itself rather than to winning it, how to play Mexican Train is the place to start.

Keep reading

• How to play Mexican Train — the whole game
• How scoring works, with a worked example
• Doubles, covering and Blake’s rule
• What the Mexican Train actually is