Muggins

Muggins, sometimes also called All Fives, is a domino game played with any of the commonly available sets. Although suitable for up to four players, Muggins is described by John McLeod as "a good, quick two player game".''Muggins''
at pagat.com. Retrieved 30 December 2020.

Muggins is part of the Fives family of domino games whose names differ according to how many spinners are in play. Muggins is the game without a spinner, Sniff and modern All Fives have a single spinner, and, in Five Up, all doubles are spinners.Rules for All Fives at Pagat.com
Retrieved January 28, 2008. However, historically Fives or All Fives was the progenitor of the family and had no spinners.

Muggins is characterised by its 'fives' scoring system, the 'muggins rule' and the fact that there is no spinner. The aims of the game are to domino, i.e. be first to shed all one's hand tiles, and, during play, to score points by playing a tile that makes the total number of pips on all endpoints of the layout equal to a multiple of five.

History

Dominoes were introduced to England from France towards the end of the 18th century, early forms of play being the Block Game and Draw Game. The rules for these games were reprinted, largely unchanged, for over half a century. In 1863, a new game variously described as All Fives, Fives or Cribbage Dominoes appeared for the first time in both English and American sources. This game borrowed the counting and scoring features of cribbage, but 5 domino spots instead of 15 card points became the basic scoring unit, worth 1 game point. The game was played to 31 and employed a cribbage board to keep score.

The following year, rules for a game called Muggins were first published in ''The American Hoyle''. The cribbage board was dropped, 5 spots scored 5 points, and game was now 200 for two players and 150 for three or four. Despite the name, which is the same as a term used in Cribbage to challenge a player who fails to declare his scoring combinations, no such 'muggins rule' was mentioned. This omission was rectified in the 1868 edition of ''The Modern Pocket Hoyle'', but reprints of both rule sets continued to be produced in parallel for around twenty years before the version with the muggins rule prevailed. From around 1871, however, the names of All Fives and Muggins, became conflated and many publications issued rules for ''Muggins or All Fives'' or ''Muggins or Fives'' without making any distinction between the two. This confusion continues to the present day with some publications equating the names and others describing All Fives as a separate game. Some modern descriptions of All Fives are quite different from the original, having lost much of their cribbage character and incorporating a single spinner, making it identical, or closely related, to Sniff. Most published rule sets for Muggins include the rule that gives the game its name, but some modern publications omit it even though the muggins rule has been described as the unique feature of this game.

At the end of the 19th century a new variant appeared in which the first doublet