Howdy, and pull up a chair. My name is Buddy Regan. I managed a cotton gin outside Lubbock for thirty-one years and retired three years ago, and I have played 42 since I was eight years old, which my calculator tells me is fifty-seven years. My granddaddy taught me on his back porch with a set of dominoes so old the spots had worn down to dents. I still have that set. I don't play with it. It sits on the mantel and reminds me to be humble, which it doesn't always manage.

My granddaughter put this page together for me on her computer up at the college and showed me how to type into it. She says folks from all over might want to learn the game, which I doubt, but if just one fella in Ohio learns to play 42 instead of whatever it is they play up there, I'll call it worth it.

Here's how it goes. Take your time. I always do.

A double-six set of dominoes. That's 28 of them, every pair of numbers from blank-blank up to six-six. Don't bring a double-nine set to my table. That's for a different game and a different kind of person.

Four players, two teams. You sit across the table from your partner, like in bridge or spades, so you play in turn, you, them, your partner, the other one.

A pencil, a scrap of paper, and some patience. A cup of coffee helps.

Turn all the dominoes face down and stir them around on the table. That's called shaking, and whoever does it is the shaker. Then everybody draws seven. Seven times four is twenty-eight, so there's none left over, and everybody stands their dominoes up on edge in front of them so nobody else can see. The shake moves one seat to the left every hand.

Before you can bid, you have to know what you're bidding on. Five dominoes in the set are worth points, and we call them the count. Any domino whose spots add up to ten is worth ten, and any domino whose spots add up to five is worth five:

Then every trick you take is worth one more point, and there are seven tricks in a hand. Thirty-five and seven makes forty-two. And that, friend, is the name of the game.

Starting with the player on the shaker's left and going around once, each player either bids or passes. Nobody gets a second turn. You're bidding how many points your team will take in the hand, counting the count and the tricks.

Thirty is the lowest bid. After that you can bid any number up to 41, and every bid has to be higher than the one before it.

A bid of 42 is called one mark. That means you'll take every point in the hand. After one mark comes two marks, which some folks call 84. You can't open the bidding any higher than two marks, and after that each bid can only go up one mark at a time.

If everybody passes, house rules differ. At some tables you shake again. At our domino hall, the shaker gets stuck with it and has to bid 30, which teaches you not to sit there grinning when you're the shaker and your hand's no good.

Whoever wins the bid names trumps and leads the first domino. Trumps are one of the numbers, blanks up through sixes. Every domino with that number on it is a trump, and only a trump. The double is the highest, and the rest rank by the number on their other end. Say you name fours. Then your trumps from top to bottom are:

That's seven trumps in the set, and if you're holding four of them and the double, you're in good shape.

Now here's the part that trips up new folks. When a domino that isn't a trump is led, it belongs to the suit of its higher end. Lead the [6|3] and you've led a six. Everybody has to follow with a six if they've got one. The double is highest in its suit, then down from there.

When you're following, though, a domino counts for either of its numbers. If somebody leads a six and you hold the [6|3], you have to play it (or another six), even if you were saving it for the threes. If you can't follow suit, you can play anything you like, including a trump, and a trump beats any domino that isn't one.

Whoever wins the trick leads the next one.

At the end of the hand, the bidding team adds up the count in their tricks and one point for each trick. If they made their bid, they win the hand. If they come up short, they're set, and the other side wins it. You don't keep the points, you keep marks. Winning a hand is worth one mark, or two if the bid was two marks, and so on.

First team to seven marks wins the game. Most folks I know draw the marks with straight lines so that seven of them spell out the word ALL: three lines for the A and two for each L. When your side's got ALL, you're done, and the other side shakes for the next game and acts like they meant to lose.

The way I always heard it, and the way most folks tell it, two boys in a little town up in Parker County, west of Fort Worth, made the game up around 1887. Their folks were good Baptists who wouldn't have a deck of cards in the house, on account of cards being the devil's own tools. So the boys took the dominoes, which nobody minded, and worked out a way to play them like the trick-taking card games the cowhands played. Bid, trumps, tricks, the whole business, and not a single card in sight.

I can't swear to every word of that. Nobody alive can. But I can tell you that in my granddaddy's house, cards stayed in the barn and dominoes came to the kitchen table, and that's the truth.