While doing some research to learn more about the dice game of Cee-lo. I stumbled on a paper by Stewart Culin, an American ethnographer, on Chinese games involving dice and dominoes. Scanning through it, I found a section, titled “FORTUNE TELLING WITH DOMINOES” which piqued my interest. However, the section did not go into specifics, so I was left wondering on the remaining instructions for the process.
I could not find any sources on this in English, although I found a few in Chinese. I read a few of them, and will give more detailed instructions of the method mentioned by Culin.
1. Start off with a set of 32 dominoes.
2. Rearrange them face-down, and then line them up in a row
3. Reveal the dominoes
4. Look for patterns in adjacent dominoes, using the following table. Tally up the points each time you see the following occurrence(s):
| Unlike | Three adjacent dominoes consisting of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 pips (6 points) |
| Ingeniously Divided | Three adjacent dominoes consisting of four sides with the same number of pips, and the remaining two sides adding up to the pips of the remaining four sides (4 points) |
| Five Spots | Three adjacent dominoes consisting of five sides with the same number of pips (5 points) |
| Divided Reciprocally | Three adjacent dominoes with three sides sharing a number of pips, and the other three sides also sharing a number of pips (3 points) |
| Cavalry | Three adjacent dominoes with sides of 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6 (3 points) |
| Two, Three, Six | Three adjacent dominoes with sides of 2, 2, 3, 3, 6, 6 (3 points) |
| Ace, Two, Three | Three adjacent dominoes with sides of 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3 (3 points) |
| Corresponding Spots | Two adjacent dominoes that are the same (3 points) |
| Correctly Satisfied | Three adjacent dominoes, with three sides being the same, and the remaining three sides having a sum greater than or equal to 14 (1 point) |
5. After going through all the adjacent sets of dominoes, If the tally is 12 or greater, mark your result down as 上上 (top top). If it’s 10 or 11, mark it down as 上中 (up middle). 8 or 9, 中平 (middle flat). 5, 6, or 7, 中下 (middle down). 4 or below, 下下 (down down).
6. Repeat steps 2 through 5 again two more times, noting down your final result each time.
7. Once you have the three results, consult the 牙牌神數. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/NTL-9900014378_%E7%89%99%E7%89%8C%E7%A5%9E%E6%95%B8.pdf
At this point, I think it’s important to point out that there’s some ambiguity between what the patterns exactly entail, and what the result each final tally should correspond with. For example, the Alone in the Fart blog and the 360 doc website seem to disagree on what calvary (馬軍) means, with the former going with 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, and the latter going with 1, 1, 4, 4, 3, 3. Culin’s report matching the final sum with the result also seems to be pretty inconsistent with the fact that he only offers four possible results (leaving out “up middle”), so I decided to go with the correspondences in the Alone in the Fart blog post.
Sources:
https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/29841/Culin_1893_491-537.pdf
https://aloneinthefart.blogspot.com/2009/04/blog-post_14.html
http://www.360doc.com/content/12/1112/18/7344134_247444885.shtml