Hey, can I ask about dominos in your experience? Like, who plays it and how it's played? I wanna include it in a fic I'm planning and I want to try to get it right.
dominos are a huge part of cuban social life! dominos, cigars, and cafe are what we do when we just want to sit around talking. it’s mostly played by either young children or elders in the family, less so by teenagers and adults in between. i used to play the game A LOT when i was 12 and under because my family thought it was important to teach me and because i thought scrambling the dominos at the beginning was fun. after growing up its more just something i see grandparents doing at family gatherings and occasionally i sit down for a game or two. sometimes games between family members get really heated with the entire family standing around watching them play and commenting on every decision lmao.
but its mostly an old people thing, theyre addicted to it. it would be pretty unusual for a group of friends between ages 15 - 30 to decide to play dominos together. not that theres any reason for it not to happen, its just not typical.
you can read the rules of the game here. you’re basically connecting fichas (our word for the domino tiles) on two ends of the “board” (theres no actual board, you can play on tables or on the floor) and trying to get rid of the ones with the highest number asap. it’s really strategic and to be good at it you need to be good at remembering which tiles have been played. theres math involved.
(the site i linked says the game starts with the double 9 traditionally - which is true in havana but not el oriente! we use sets where the highest is a double 6. so your character would be more used to playing with a different set depending on which side of the island theyre from)
it either ends by someone putting the last ficha in their hand down and shouting “domino!” or a situation where players still have fichas but no viable moves for them, where we grumble “se tranco el juego” (the game’s stuck) and count up the value of our tiles - the person with the lowest value wins.
for the record “se tranco el juego” is also a conversational phrase we use in everyday life to mean that you’re in a dead end situation, there’s nothing you can do, etc.
here’s another article thats a bit more complicated in explaining it but i thought the intro paragraph was a pretty authentic example of what a game is like. it also has some domino-related cuban slang at the end! we have special names for the fichas too, for example 1 is “puntilla” and 4 is “gato”
