Having quite an extensive history in the world of games due to their portability and ease of creation, domino and tile games have been around for thousands of years in one form or another. The fact that these games do not always require a mat or other type of board made them easier for the older civilizations to make and distribute for the age of making mass goods and easily selling them first came into being. Due to this ease of transport, the games spread across both Europe and Asia, even having counterparts that were developed in some South American cultures. The fetish type element of creating the game pieces gave them a physical appeal to the primitive cultures which began the tradition of carving stone, bone or wood into tiles and similar pieces for play in this type of game. It would not be long before such games saw rising international popularity.
Today, dominoes is still a very popular game due to its reliance on the elements of both skill and strategy while still being rather easy to for new players to learn to play. In some circles, dominoes are believed to have been a simplification of the dice because they were easier to create than a cube. Instead of representing the sides of the dice, the tiles could represent the same numbers in an easier to make format. There are many different varieties of dominoes itself, including such variants as Texas 42, Mexican Train, Chicken Foot and Muggins. Each has its own more specific set of rules. The other massively popular game played in a tile format is Mahjong which now has a huge following outside of Asian due to the fact that it was quite a popular computer game in the Western world long before it had been shown to the masses there. The strategic elements of these games continues to make them highly attractive to those who want to game at a slower pace, such as older adults.
There are other less popular variants of this style of game, some of them such as Triominoes and Quad Ominos being simple variants of the dominoes style, others such as Rummikub being a tile based version of the popular rummy card game. Players who enjoy the table top setting and prefer a more straight forward and physical style of play enjoy these games for their challenge to both logic and strategy. There are also even more complex versions of tile games such as Hive or Carcassonne that use tiles and are very intricate in the style of rules for play that they offer. Settlers of Catan is a good example of a tile type game that goes in a totally different and more simulation based direction with the general tile concept.
