Texas 42

Texas 42 was born at a swimming hole. In 1887, two twelve-year-old boys — William Thomas and Walter Trapp — were sitting on the banks of the Frio River at Trappe Spring, in the Texas Hill Country, with nothing to do. They had a set of dominoes but no cards, and they wanted to play a trick-taking game like the ones their parents played. So they invented one. They assigned each domino a suit and a rank — the tiles became cards, the double-six became the highest trump, and the blank became the lowest — and they called the game 42, because that is the number of points available in each hand: one for each pip on the seven highest tiles. The game spread from the swimming hole to the ranches, from the ranches to the feed stores, and from the feed stores to every courthouse and fire station in Texas. By the 1930s, 42 was the state game in everything but name — and in 2011, the Texas legislature made it official, designating 42 the state domino game of Texas.

The game is played with a standard double-six domino set — twenty-eight tiles, from the double-blank to the double-six. Four players play in two partnerships, partners sitting across from each other. Each player draws seven tiles. The highest bidder names the trump suit — the suit of the tile whose higher half is the trump number — and leads the first trick. The tiles are played like cards: each player follows suit if they can, the highest trump wins, or if no trump is played, the highest tile of the suit led wins. The count tiles — the tiles whose pips total five or a multiple of five — are worth their pip count: the 5-5 is ten points, the 6-4 is ten, the 5-0 is five, and so on, for a total of forty-two points in the hand. The bidder must make their bid or go set — they lose the value of the bid. The game is to a hundred, or a hundred and twenty-one, or whatever the house rules say.

What makes 42 endure is that it is a trick-taking game played with tiles, and that combination is stranger and more satisfying than it sounds. The tiles have no hidden information — everyone can see what has been played — but the bidding and the partnership play make it a game of communication and inference, like bridge with dominoes. The empty nester finds in 42 what generations of Texans have found: a game that takes an hour to learn and a lifetime to play well, that is social in the way only a four-player partnership game can be, and that carries the whole history of the Texas Hill Country in its bones. The dominoes are the same twenty-eight tiles you played as a child, but in 42 they become a deck, and the deck becomes a conversation.