A Family Tradition

One of my most beloved family traditions that is relatively recent in its evolution (like, within the last ten years) is that of playing dominoes. Not only at holidays, but any time we get together for a meal and want to kill some time afterwards. We started with Mexican Train, but soon moved on to Chicken Foot.

Chicken Foot is actually a very simple game, but it requires a certain amount of strategy.

Every player starts with several dominos (for argument's sake I'm going to say 7, but a lot of this depends on the number of people you have playing and the size of your set)

You put a double in the middle, usually the highest number you have. Before anything else can be played, the two "chicken feet" need to be built off of this double. Think about a chicken foot and how it has three toes. Well, you have to build three toes off of either side of this double. See the double nine (the pink dots) in the picture? That's where you start and how you build two chicken feet!

Once the feet have been built, you can play anything you want.

If someone plays another double, you must build a chicken foot (three toes) off of that double before anything else can be played. In the picture, that's the double six (red dots).

If you can't play anything on your turn, you have to draw. That means if you're mid-foot and you can't put something on the foot but you can play somewhere else, you still have to draw because nobody can play anything else until the foot is constructed!

Keep going until someone goes out (doesn't have any more dominos left). Everyone else counts up the number of dots they have left. The goal is to have a low score.

If you get left with a double blank, that is 100 points, so you don't want to get stuck with that (but you don't want your opponents to be able to play it, either!)

In my family, we had an "extra" rule - every person had to have a "chicken domino name." We always fought over who got to be Nugget. My grandmother was always the Domiclucker. One favorite that came out of sheer madness was "Chicken Lil' Kim". Don't ask, because I have no idea!

What are some of your favorite family traditions surrounding holidays or get togethers?