A night on the tiles

From bloody beginnings of drunken mayhem in public houses, it is somewhat surprising that the game of dominoes reached pearl-encrusted heights in our royal palaces

- Harry Pearson

The clack of hard tiles on a table top and the gentle knock of a crooked finger on wood are sounds as familiar in the British pub as the thunk of darts, the jingle of the till and grumbling conversation about the weather. Yet dominoes, the venerable game with which these noises are associated, spent seven centuries getting here.

The game originated in China during the 12th-century Song Dynasty and arrived in Italy via the great trading city of Venice. Here, the game received its new name, in honour either of the domino, a spotted cape that was one of the costumes worn in the city's famous masquerades, or of the black-and-white clothing of Dominican friars.

Like rice and pasta, those other popular products of Italian-Chinese interaction, dominoes was slow to gain a toehold in Britain. The first man to give full study to English pastimes, Georgian writer Joseph Strutt, huffily dismissed dominoes as 'a very childish sport', which 'could have nothing but the novelty to recommend it to the notice of grown persons in this country'.