Texas 42

42 is a trick-taking game played with a double-six set of dominoes — the game Texas made its official State Domino Game, not the card game and not the number. Four players, two partnerships, seven tiles each, and exactly 42 points on the table every hand.

This page teaches standard Texas 42 — straight 42, as governed by the National 42 Players Association tournament rules. Special contracts like Nel-O and Plunge are real, but they are not part of the base game; they live in a clearly-marked section at the end and appear nowhere in the tutorial, the odds, or the hand evaluator. Wherever common house rules disagree with the tournament rules, you will see a marked House rule box.

Every percentage on this page is produced by tools/42-odds.py, which counts all 1,184,040 possible seven-tile hands one at a time. Nothing here is simulated and nothing is estimated. Everything else is cited to a named source.

• 1 · Tutorial
• 2 · Bidding Odds
• 3 · Distribution
• 4 · Winning Hands
• 5 · Advanced
• 6 · Reading the Table
• 7 · Who Wins?
• Hand Evaluator
• Table Card

1 · Beginner Tutorial

Everything you need to sit down and play a legal hand. If you already play a trick-taking card game — spades, bridge, euchre — most of this will map straight across: there are suits, there is trump, you follow suit, and the highest tile wins. The differences are that a domino belongs to two suits at once, and that the points live on five specific tiles rather than on the face cards.

The set

One double-six set: every pair of numbers from 0 to 6, including the pairs where both halves match. That is 28 tiles — 7 doubles and 21 non-doubles. There is no boneyard in 42. All 28 tiles are dealt, so between the four players every tile is accounted for on every hand. That single fact is what makes the counting on this page exact.

Teams and seating

Four players, two partnerships. Partners sit opposite each other, so play alternates opponent–partner–opponent around the table. You never see your partner's tiles and you may not tell them what you hold.

The shake and the draw

The tiles go face down on the table and get stirred — the shake. The player doing the stirring is the shaker. Each player then draws seven tiles and stands them on edge facing themselves. N42PA tournament rules require you to set them out in two rows of four and three and leave them there once bidding starts; rearranging your tiles is a tell.

Shake / shaker terminology: Pagat, Wikipedia. Tile-layout and no-rearranging rule: N42PA official tournament rules.

Suits — the rule everybody gets wrong first

There are seven number suits: blanks, ones, twos, threes, fours, fives and sixes. A non-double belongs to both of its numbers. The 6-4 is a six and it is a four. A double belongs only to its own number, and it is the highest tile in that suit.

Do the arithmetic and each suit turns out to hold exactly seven tiles: the six other non-doubles carrying that number, plus its double. Seven suits, seven tiles each — and the seven doubles form a seventh-and-a-half family of their own, which matters more than it looks like it should (see below).

Two consequences that decide tricks, and that new players trip over:

• Once trump is named, trumps stop being anything else. If sixes are trump, the 6-4 is a trump — it can no longer be played as a four. Every tile bearing the trump number is trump and nothing else.
• A led non-trump tile calls its higher end. If you lead the 6-4 when sixes are not trump, you have led sixes, not fours. When you are following, though, the tile counts as either of its numbers — so the 6-4 can follow a four just fine.

Dual suit membership and the led-tile rule: Pagat, Texas 42 and Follow Me 42. Trump absorption stated explicitly by Follow Me 42; the high-end-when-led rule also at texas42.net.

The count tiles

Five tiles carry points. Every tile whose two halves add to five is worth 5; every tile whose halves add to ten is worth 10.

• 5 pts
• 5 pts
• 5 pts
• 10 pts
• 10 pts

That is 35 points sitting on the tiles. Each of the seven tricks is also worth one point on its own, which adds 7 more. 35 + 7 = 42, and that is where the game gets its name. If you ever see it written that the count tiles are worth 42, that is wrong — they are worth 35.

Count tiles named individually and the 7 + 35 arithmetic: texas42.net scoring and Follow Me 42. Point values also at Pagat.

Bidding

One round, one bid each. Bidding starts to the left of the shaker and goes clockwise; every player either bids or passes, exactly once. Each bid must beat the one before it.

• The minimum bid is 30. Point bids run 30, 31, … up to 41.
• Above 41 you bid in marks. One mark = 42 = all the points on the table. Then 2 marks, 3 marks, and so on. A mark bid is a commitment to take every trick and every point.
• The highest opening bid allowed is 2 marks, so the most a single round can escalate to is 5 marks — 2, then 3, then 4, then 5.

Bid ladder and the 2-mark opening cap: N42PA; Pagat agrees. Note that Follow Me 42 claims the opposite — that N42PA has no opening cap. N42PA's own page states the 2-mark maximum, so this page follows N42PA.

Naming trump

The winning bidder names trump and leads the first trick. Under N42PA tournament rules there are eight legal calls: any one of the seven numbers, or doubles as their own suit (6-6 high down to 0-0). You may also decline trump entirely and call follow me — no trump, highest tile of the led suit wins. What N42PA does not permit is combining the two: follow me with doubles pulled out as a separate suit.

Playing a trick

The bidder leads. Going clockwise, each player must follow suit if able. The trick is won by the highest trump played; if nobody played a trump, by the highest tile of the suit that was led. Whoever wins the trick leads the next one. Seven tricks, then the hand is scored.

“Highest” inside a suit means: the double first, then the other tiles ranked by their other number. In sixes, the order is 6-6, 6-5, 6-4, 6-3, 6-2, 6-1, 6-0.

Scoring by marks

Add up what the bidding side took: one point per trick won, plus the count on the tiles in those tricks. Make your bid and your side scores one mark. Fall short — get set — and the opposing side scores the mark instead. Bid two marks and both the reward and the penalty double.

Game is usually seven marks, tallied by drawing the letters of “ALL” and adding strokes.

2 · Bidding Odds Cheatsheet

Two questions get confused constantly, and they differ by an order of magnitude. Get them straight before reading the table.

The doubles are a suit for probability purposes. There are seven of them, exactly as there are seven tiles in any number suit, so the chance of being dealt n doubles is identical to the chance of being dealt n of the fives — column two of that table applies to both without changing a digit. That is not a coincidence worth shrugging at: it means a four-doubles hand is exactly as rare as a four-fives hand, 3.93%, and it is why doubles-as-trump is a live call rather than a novelty.

Spare trumps, and why they are the number that matters

A trump you spend dragging out an opponent's trump is not a winner you get to keep — it is a toll. Spare trumps are what is left after the tolls are paid: spare = held − leads spent. That is the whole difference between four trumps and three. Both strip almost always; four leaves you 2.18 trumps to win tricks with afterwards and three leaves you 0.74.

These figures assume you hold the high trumps and lead them. If your trumps sit under the opponents', you are not the one pulling — they are, and the table does not describe your hand.

The loss budget

A bid is not a promise to win everything. It is a promise to lose no more than 42 − bid. Price each disaster before you bid and you will know instantly whether your hand can absorb it. A lost trick costs one point for the trick plus every count point riding on it — which is why a single lost trick can cost anywhere from 1 to 21.

The costing arithmetic is the game's own scoring — one point per trick plus the count on it — as set out at texas42.net. Pagat's strategy notes use the same logic from the defender's side: to set a bid of 36 or less the defence needs a 10-count, or a 5-count and two tricks; at 37 the bidder can afford to lose no count at all.

3 · Reading the Distribution

Because all 28 tiles are dealt, everything you cannot see is in exactly three other hands of seven. That is a much stronger position than it sounds — you are never guessing about a hidden pile, only about an arrangement.

The two-tile rule

One formula covers most of the questions you will actually ask at the table: are those two tiles sitting together, or are they split?

Worked example 1 — you hold five trumps

Five trumps in your hand means two are loose among 21 unseen tiles in hands of seven: (7 − 1) ÷ (21 − 1) = 6 ÷ 20 = 30.0%. So 30% of the time both outstanding trumps sit with the same opponent, and 70% of the time they are split one apiece.

Worked example 2 — two tricks in

The rule keeps working as the hand empties, and it tightens. After two tricks everyone holds five tiles and 15 are unseen from your seat: (5 − 1) ÷ (15 − 1) = 4 ÷ 14 = 28.6%. So if the last two count tiles you are chasing are still out after two tricks, they are apart about 71.4% of the time — and each trick that goes by makes splitting slightly more likely, not less.

How many leads it takes to strip

Every time you lead trump, everyone holding one has to play it. So the number of leads you need is simply the most trumps sitting in any one of the other three hands — your partner's included, because their trump comes out on your lead the same as anyone else's. The table below is the exact distribution of that maximum.

Assumption, stated plainly because the table is worthless without it: you hold the high trumps and you are the one leading them. Under that assumption every trump you hold wins a trick — the split only decides how many leads it takes to get there.

Read the top row and you can see why two trumps is a pass: with five trumps out against you, more than half the time somebody holds three or more of them, and you do not have enough trumps left to keep leading. Hold three and you finish the job 98.25% of the time — but you spend two leads doing it in 73.68% of hands, and three leads in another 24.56%.

What else you can infer

You are dealt 8.75 count points on average, out of the 35 on the table. So the working assumption at the start of every hand is that roughly three quarters of the count is somewhere else. Holding two count tiles is normal — it happens 28.42% of the time. Holding four is a genuine event at 0.75%.

4 · Recognizing a Winning Hand

What counts as a sure trick

A sure trick is a tile that cannot be beaten by anything an opponent could still be holding at the moment you play it. In practice there is exactly one reliable source of them:

• Trumps in an unbroken run from the top. Start at the trump double and count down. Every trump you hold with no missing trump above it is a sure trick. Stop at the first gap — the tile above the gap belongs to somebody else, and everything below it is now beatable.
• Then, after the strip, the rest of your trumps. Once every outstanding trump has been pulled, your low trumps win too, because nothing can beat them. This is the payoff the spare-trump column measures.

Off-suit doubles are the tempting exception, and they are not sure. The 5-5 is the highest five, but a player void in fives can trump it. Count them as probable, never as banked.

The 30-second evaluation

1. Name your suit. Count your tiles in each of the seven numbers and in the doubles. Take the longest. Ties go to the one whose tiles are higher.
2. Count your walkers. From the top of that suit down, how many do you hold before the first gap? That is your sure-trick core.
3. Look up your spare trumps. Four trumps leaves about 2.18; three leaves about 0.74; two leaves 0.00.
4. Count the count. Add up the count tiles in your hand — and check whether any of them became trump when you named your suit. A 6-4 with sixes trump is ten points you cannot lose.
5. Price the leftovers. Everything that is not trump is an off — a tile that will probably lose a trick. Count them, and check whether any of them is a count tile you will be handing over. Then check the loss budget: can you afford to lose that many?

“Offs” as the standard word for these tiles: Austin 42 terminology (site returning a server error at time of writing — see the archived copy), Pagat, and Wikipedia, which also defines bad offs as the ones that risk losing count when led. Steps 1–5 are this page's own procedure, built from the enumerated odds above; it is a decision routine, not a rule of the game.

Four hands

A clear pass

A marginal 30

A comfortable 30–32

Mark-worthy

Hand-shape judgements above follow this page's own procedure. Two supporting external points: Pagat notes that real bids cluster at 30–31 and 35–36 rather than spreading evenly, and warns that weakness in the fours, fives and sixes is dangerous precisely because those suits carry the ten-count tiles.

5 · Advanced Play

Everything in this section is attributed. Where a technique is a general trick-taking principle rather than something a 42 authority publishes, it says so. Where the sources disagree — and on one important point they flatly do — both are named.

Voiding a suit

To void a suit is to deliberately empty it out of your hand. The point is not the suit you get rid of — it is that once you hold none of a suit, you are no longer obliged to follow it. You are free to trump in, to dump a loser, or to hand count to your partner, none of which you can do while you still have to follow.

Austin 42, Voiding (archived): the aim is to eliminate suits from your hand so you gain the option to signal, to feed count to a partner, or to void a second suit. Pagat gives the defensive version — void early so you can throw count for your partner to catch, or trump in and catch it yourself.

Leading trump versus leading offs

The default as bidder is to pull the opponents' trumps as fast as you can, because that is what turns your low trumps into winners. But it is a default, not a law, and Pagat gives three named exceptions.

• Lead your bad off first. If you are long in trumps and doubles but holding one ugly off, get rid of it before you start pulling trump — otherwise the opponents spend your trump leads dumping their off-suit count somewhere safe.
• Lead a small off to your partner. If you do not hold the trump double, or one of your trumps is vulnerable, giving your partner the lead beats leading into trouble yourself.
• Keep one trump back on a low bid. On 30 to 35, hold a trump for the last trick so you can sweep whatever count the opponents have been sitting on.

All three from Pagat's Texas 42 strategy notes, which also suggests baiting count out of opponents by leading a strong but non-double trump. Austin 42, Wikipedia and Texas Monthly publish nothing on lead selection.

Playing as the setting team

Defending is a different game, and only one of the sources consulted treats it seriously. The governing fact is that your window is narrow — you usually get one or two tricks where a set is available, and if you play it safe through them you have already lost.

• Lead hard. If you hold count, put it out and hope it lands on the bidder's off or your partner catches it.
• When a trick looks catchable by your side, load it with count — unless you think the bidders will trump it.
• Giving away a small trump that happens to be a count tile can convince the bidders you are out of trumps entirely. It costs you a little and buys a misread.

Pagat, Defensive Strategies. Austin 42 names “the setters” as a perspective but publishes no defensive material; Wikipedia and Texas Monthly have none.

Count-tile management

Count moves in one of two directions and the choice is rarely close once you ask the right question: who is going to win this trick?

• Throw it to your partner when your side is winning the trick — unless the bidders can still trump in, in which case you are gift-wrapping ten points.
• Hold it back as a defender when the bidders lead a non-double: release no more than a 5-count. The exception is a small trump lead, which they can usually walk anyway — you were probably not setting them, so the 10-count can go.
• Watch the fours, fives and sixes. Those are the suits carrying the ten-count tiles, so weakness there is more expensive than weakness elsewhere.

All three from Pagat. Austin 42's Voiding page frames voiding explicitly as the mechanism that makes feeding count to a partner possible.

Reading the bidding

One round of bidding is one round of information, and it is the only legal information you will get. Austin 42 publishes the most developed reading of it: bids divide into threshold bids — 30, 31, 35, 36 — which say “I want this hand,” and strength-of-hand bids, roughly 32–34 and 37–39, which say “I am not claiming it, here is how much help I have.”

The threshold numbers are not arbitrary; they are the loss budget in disguise. A 30 tolerates one 10-count plus a trick. A 31 tolerates the 10-count and nothing else. A 35 tolerates a 5-count plus a trick, and a 36 tolerates the 5-count alone. Check those against the meter above and they line up exactly.

Pagat adds two reads worth having: bidding 30 while holding a lot of count advertises a helping hand and invites your partner to raise; and bidding 36 on a good hand is partly a blocking move, because it makes raising expensive for the opponents.

Vocabulary you will hear

Shake — to shuffle; the shaker is the one doing it. Offs — tiles that are neither trump nor likely winners; Wikipedia further names bad offs, the ones that risk losing count when led. Count — the five scoring tiles, also called grease, sugar or money. Set — to stop the bidding team from making its contract. Marks — the scoring ticks, seven to win. Laydown — a hand you can claim without playing it out.

One caution on a phrase you will hear at tables and see in forum posts: walking the trumps. None of the sources consulted defines it. Wikipedia does define walk — leading a low tile once everything that could beat it has been played — which is a related but narrower idea. Treat “walking the trumps” as ordinary table vocabulary for leading trump repeatedly to strip, not as a term of art with a published definition.

Definitions from Wikipedia, Pagat, and Austin 42's terminology list (archived).

Optional variants — not part of straight 42

Everything above this line, and every number on this page, describes straight 42. The contracts below are real and widely played, but they are add-ons that a table has to agree to before the game starts. None of them is assumed anywhere else on this page. Austin 42 notes that its own club plays straight 42 and generally does not use them.

Nel-O

Also spelled Nello, Nillo, or just “low.” A contract to lose every trick, bid at one mark or more. Your partner turns their tiles face down and sits the hand out; you lead first and there is no trump. Doubles become their own suit. Take a single trick and the hand ends immediately with the mark going to the opponents. The doubles can be ranked high, low, or in their own suit, and the table has to pick which before play — Austin 42 lists own-suit as the version most often seen in Texas.

Pagat, Wikipedia, Austin 42.

Sevens

Every player must play the tile whose pips total closest to seven; closest wins the trick, ties to whoever played first. Pagat's assessment is blunt — there is no strategy in it. Austin 42 does not list Sevens among its variations at all.

Pagat, Wikipedia.

Splash and Plunge — where the authorities contradict each other

Both are contracts where you declare on the strength of your doubles and then hand control to your partner, who names trump and leads without consulting you. Both require all seven tricks. What they do not agree on is the most basic parameter: how many doubles each one takes. This is not a subtlety of interpretation — the two sources are reversed.

Austin 42 says Plunge takes three doubles and Splash takes four. Pagat says the exact opposite. Wikipedia agrees with Pagat on the doubles and diverges on the mark values. There is no resolving this from the outside — ask your table, and if you are the one explaining the rules, say the numbers out loud rather than assuming everyone learned the same version.

Plunge is also the one recognised exception to the two-mark opening cap: Pagat notes it is the only bid permitted to jump straight above two marks.

Follow me, points-to-250, and the rest

Follow me (no trump) is legal in straight 42 under N42PA, so it is in the tutorial rather than here. Low-No, Reshake, Double Low and Doubles Reverse are table agreements documented by Pagat and Austin 42. Scoring to 250 points instead of seven marks is documented by texas42.net, which also records that N42PA treats marks as the tournament standard.

Where to go deeper

The standard strategy text for this game is Dennis Roberson's Winning 42: Strategy and Lore of the National Game of Texas (Texas Tech University Press). It is the book serious players cite, and it goes considerably further than any free web source including this page. It was not consulted in writing this page, so nothing here is attributed to it — but if you want the next level, that is where it is.

A note on where 42 came from

Two boys in Garner, Texas — William Thomas and Walter Earl — invented it in 1887 after being caught playing cards, which their Baptist community treated as sinful in a way dominoes somehow were not. The Texas Legislature made it the official State Domino Game in 2011, and the state championship is played in Hallettsville on the first Saturday of March.

Wikipedia and Texas Monthly. The two spell the original settlement differently (Trappe versus Trapps Springs).

6 · Reading the Table

This is the part of 42 that separates people who have played for a year from people who have played for twenty, and almost none of it is memory. It is bookkeeping. Because all 28 tiles are dealt and none are held back, every tile that hits the table removes a possibility permanently — and the possibilities that survive are what you are playing against.

The one signal worth more than all the others

When a player fails to follow suit, they are void in that suit — and they stay void for the rest of the hand. It cannot be undone, it cannot be faked without reneging, and it is free information handed to everyone at the table.

This is the difference between 42 and a card game where players hold back. Nobody discards from a stockpile, nobody draws. If the fives are led and the player on your left plays a three-two, that player has no fives, will never have fives, and every remaining five is in one of the other three hands. You have just eliminated seven tiles' worth of uncertainty with one observation.

The renege rules that make this reliable — failing to follow suit when you could costs your team a mark, or all marks at stake above 42 — are at N42PA and texas42.net. The inference itself is ordinary trick-taking logic, not a technique unique to 42.

A void makes the odds move — in the direction people guess wrong

Intuition says eliminating a hand should make two loose tiles more likely to be split up. The opposite is true: with fewer hands available, the two of them crowd together.

So if you hold five trumps and one opponent has already shown void in trump, the last two trumps sit in the same hand 46.2% of the time rather than 30.0%. That is not academic: it is the difference between planning one more trump lead and planning two.

Counting the trumps

Seven tiles in the trump suit, always. Subtract what you hold and you know exactly how many are out. Then count them down as they fall. The moment the last one hits the table, every trump left in your hand is a guaranteed trick, no matter how small, because there is nothing left in the game that can beat it.

This is the single most valuable number to carry in your head, and it is one number. If you track nothing else, track this.

Reading your partner

Your partner is playing tiles for a reason and you get to watch all of them. Three things are worth reading, in rough order of reliability:

• What they throw when they cannot follow. A partner discarding count onto a trick your side is winning is supporting you. A partner discarding a bare off onto a trick your side is losing is protecting their count for later — they are telling you they still hold something worth protecting.
• What they led. Leading a suit generally means strength in it, or a deliberate attempt to hand you the lead. Both are useful; which one it is usually depends on whether the tile they led was high.
• What they bid. A 30 or 31 from your partner is an invitation to raise if you have support. On tables that force the last bidder, a 30 from that seat means almost nothing — they may have been rescued into it.

The bidding reads are from Pagat (bidding 30 with count invites a raise; the forced-bid seat's 30 carries less information) and Austin 42's bidding conventions (archived). The discard reads are general trick-taking inference, not sourced to a 42 authority.

What to actually keep track of

You do not need to reconstruct three hands. You need four facts, and three of them are just numbers:

1. Trumps still out. One number, counted down.
2. Count still out. Which of the five count tiles have not appeared.
3. Voids. Who has shown they cannot follow what. Only record voids — never try to record holdings.
4. Who has the lead and why. Whether they took it or were given it.

The grid below is what item three looks like written down. In practice you carry it in your head, and it is small because you only ever add to it — a void, once true, is true forever.

Three reads, worked through

Read 1 — the discard that gives away a hand

Sixes are trump. You lead the 6-6 to start pulling.

• You leadtrump
• Leftfollowed
• Partnerfollowed
• Rightcould not follow

Read 2 — the void that redirects your whole plan

Fives are trump. Trumps are gone. You lead the 6-6 hoping to cash a big off.

• You leadwins
• Leftfollowed
• Partnerthrew the 10
• Rightvoid in sixes

Read 3 — counting the trumps down to zero

Fours are trump. You hold five of them, so two are out. Over the first two tricks you lead the 4-4 and then the 6-4:

• Trick 1 — youtrump lead
• Lefttrump 1 of 2
• Partnerno trump
• Rightno trump

• Trick 2 — youtrump lead
• Lefttrump 2 of 2
• Partnerstill none
• Rightstill none

7 · Who Wins This Trick?

Four tiles are down and somebody is arguing. This resolves it. Set the trump, put the four tiles in the order they were played, and the tool walks the rule chain out loud rather than just announcing a winner.

The rule chain, in order

1. What suit was led? If the first tile is a trump, trump was led. Otherwise the led suit is that tile's high end — leading the 6-2 when sixes are not trump leads sixes, not twos.
2. Did anyone play a trump? Any tile carrying the trump number is a trump, including tiles that would otherwise belong to the led suit. If a trump appeared, the highest trump wins and the led suit stops mattering entirely.
3. If not, who followed suit? Among the tiles carrying the led number, the highest wins. A tile carrying neither the trump nor the led number is a discard and cannot win no matter how big it looks.
4. Ranking inside a suit: the double is highest, then the rest by their other end, descending. In sixes: 6-6, 6-5, 6-4, 6-3, 6-2, 6-1, 6-0.

Rule chain from Pagat (follow suit if able; highest trump wins, otherwise highest of the suit led; the double is the highest domino of its suit; a led tile counts as its higher number while a following tile may count as either) and texas42.net (a led tile takes its high end as the suit unless the low end is trump).

The three that cause arguments

The count tile that is secretly a trump

Sixes are trump. The 6-4 is not a ten-count sitting in the fours — it is a trump.

• Ledleads fours
• 2ndhigh four
• 3rdtrump — wins
• 4thfollows fours

The 4-4 is the highest four and it still loses. The 6-4 carries a six, so with sixes trump it is a trump and beats every non-trump on the table — and because it could not have followed fours at all, playing it there was mandatory only if its holder had no other four. Fifteen count points go to the third seat.

The double that could not follow

Threes are trump. The 6-6 is led, so sixes are led.

• Ledleads sixes
• 2ndfollows
• 3rdtrump — wins
• 4thdiscard, cannot win

The 3-0 is the smallest tile on the table and takes the trick, because the smallest trump beats the largest non-trump. The 5-5 is a ten-count and the highest five in the game, and it does nothing here — it carries no six and no three, so it is a discard. Ten points handed to the third seat, which is exactly the mistake the reading section is about avoiding.

Follow me, where nothing is trump

No trump was called. The 5-4 is led, so fives are led.

• Ledleads fives
• 2nddouble — wins
• 3rddiscard
• 4thfollows

With no trump the only question is who followed. The 5-5 is the highest five and takes it. The 6-6 is the biggest tile in the set and is worthless here, because there is no trump to make it one and it carries no five.

Hand Evaluator

Pick the seven tiles you were dealt. The evaluator runs the same five-step procedure from section 4, looks your trump count up in the enumerated tables, and tells you what it would bid and why.

The probabilities it shows come from tools/42-odds.py. The verdict itself is a decision rule, not a probability — the exact rule is printed underneath so you can disagree with it on purpose.

Table Card

The ten things worth memorising. This section is built to be readable on a phone.

1. 35 count + 7 tricks = 42. The tiles are worth 35, not 42.
2. Count tiles: 5-0, 4-1, 3-2 are five each; 6-4 and 5-5 are ten each.
3. Every non-double is in two suits. Once trump is called, trumps are trump only.
4. A led non-trump tile calls its high end. Following, it can be either end.
5. Each suit holds seven tiles — six plus its double. So do the doubles, as a family.
6. Four trumps is the floor of a real bid. Strips 100% of the time, 2.18 spare.
7. Three trumps is marginal (0.74 spare), two is a pass (strips 45.51%).
8. Your bid is a loss budget: 42 − bid. A plain trick costs 1, a 5-count trick 6, a 10-count trick 11.
9. Two unseen tiles sit together (hand − 1) ÷ (unseen − 1) of the time — 30% at the start of a hand.
10. A bad trump split costs a lead, not a trick — as long as you hold the high trumps.

Sources

Every rule, term, strategy claim and historical fact on this page traces to one of the references below. Every percentage traces instead to tools/42-odds.py, which anyone can run to reproduce it. There is no third category.

Rules

1. National 42 Players Association — Rules. n42pa.org/home/rules, and the full tournament document linked from it (approved 27 September 2019). Supports: the canonical ruleset for this page — bidding order, minimum bid 30, the two-mark opening cap, the eight legal trump calls including doubles and follow me, the prohibition on follow-me-with-doubles, no forced bid, tile layout and no-rearranging, renege penalties, and the ban on prearranged signals and bidding conventions. Note: the site is an Angular app; a plain fetch returns an empty shell. Does not address: marks needed to win, or the count-tile arithmetic.
2. Pagat — Texas 42. pagat.com/domino/trick/42.html. Supports: careful statement of the rules — dual suit membership, the double as highest tile of its suit, the led-tile-calls-its-high-end rule, the bid ladder and the two-mark opening cap, count values, seven marks to win, all-pass procedure and the home-table forced bid, and the definitions of the special contracts including the Splash and Plunge doubles counts cited in the variants table.
3. texas42.net. texas42.net/42home.html and /42scoring.html. Supports: the count tiles named individually, the 7 + 35 = 42 arithmetic, seven marks and the “ALL” tally, doubles as a normal trump option, renege consequences, and the 250-point scoring variant together with the note that N42PA treats marks as the tournament standard. Note: HTTP only — an HTTPS request is refused.
4. Follow Me 42 — How to Play. followme42.com/howtoplay. Supports: the clearest statement that trump absorbs a tile's second suit, the count tiles and totals, mark terminology, and the redeal-on-all-pass convention. Disagrees with N42PA on two points flagged in the tutorial: it says doubles-as-trump is excluded from tournament play, and that N42PA has no opening-bid cap. This page follows N42PA on both.

Strategy

5. Pagat — Texas 42 strategy (Celko write-up). pagat.com/domino/trick/texas42.html. Supports: lead selection including the bad-off lead, the small-off lead to partner, and holding a trump back on bids of 30–35; all of the defensive/setting material; count-throwing and count-holding guidance; the fours-fives-sixes warning; the bidding reads at 30 and 36; the observation that real bids cluster at 30–31 and 35–36; and the Splash/Plunge definitions. This is the single richest strategy source consulted.
6. Austin 42 — Winning 42. austin42.org/winning-42/ and its sub-pages on voiding, indicating and bidding. Supports: the purpose of voiding, the threshold-versus-strength-of-hand bidding framework and the 30/31/35/36 tolerances, and the indicating conventions. Note: the site was returning a server error throughout the writing of this page; the material was read from Internet Archive copies, which are linked alongside each citation in the text.
7. Austin 42 — Rules and terminology. Rules, Terminology. Supports: the Splash and Plunge doubles counts that contradict Pagat, the Nel-O flavours, the definitions of offs, shake, set and marks, and the statement that the club itself plays straight 42.

Background

8. Wikipedia — 42 (dominoes). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(dominoes). Supports: the 1887 origin and the inventors' names, the 2011 State Domino Game designation, the Hallettsville championship, the definitions of bad offs, walk, shake and count, and a third reading of the Splash and Plunge requirements.
9. Texas Monthly — How to Play 42. texasmonthly.com/culture/how-to-play-42/. Supports: the origin story and the cards-were-sinful context, and the 7 + 35 arithmetic. Predates the 2011 designation and does not mention it.
10. Dennis Roberson, Winning 42: Strategy and Lore of the National Game of Texas (Texas Tech University Press). The field's standard strategy text. Not consulted for this page — listed as the recommended next step, and deliberately not used to support any claim above.

Sources last checked 28 July 2026. Two were unavailable by ordinary means at that time and are flagged inline: austin42.org returned a server error, and texas42.net refuses HTTPS.