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All Fives

All Fives can refer to both a card game played with a standard deck and a Dominoes game played with a double six set.

Card Game

The card game is part of the All Fours family, descended from the English card game All Fours and played in most former English colonies, especially the West Indies. It is the legacy of All Fours that gives us the name “Jack” for the card previously known as the Knave, and other members of the family include Auction Pitch, California lack, and Cinch. Spoil Five is a close relation, with similarly unusual rules.

The name All Fours comes from the scoring system, which awards points in four categories: the highest trump in play, the lowest trump in play, the Jack (given to the player who takes the Jack in a trump), and the Game (given to the player who takes the highest value of tricks). An amalgam of point-trick games and shorthand games like Euchre, All Fours dates from about the middle of the 17th century, and may have been adapted by the English from a Dutch game. Typically a low-class gambling game for most of its history, it was introduced to the United States in the 18th century and became the most popular card game by the 1800s.

It was in the United States that All Fives was introduced, in the middle of the 19th century, when variants of All Fours developed in order to compete with Poker, which was beginning its steady rise in popularity. All Fives is fundamentally the same as All Fours—its direct descendant, not an odd cousin like some of the other variants—but with a fifth category of points, for the player who takes the five in a trump. The trump five in All Fives is usually called the Pedro, and variants of All Fives soon developed in California—the Pedro Sancho, where the trump nine took points, the Double Pedro or High Five, in which both the trump five and the five of the opposite color take points (borrowed from Euchre), and Dom Pedro, in which the Joker (the Dom) counts 15 and takes points.

Dominoes Game

The All Fives Dominoes game is part of the Fives Family. The games in the Fives Family all base scoring on the total of the exposed ends of the tableau in multiples of five; in other words, if the pips total 15, the player gets three points. The Fives Family is widespread and old, and so a great many variations exist that are difficult to properly catalogue—Dominoes are such a community-based game that it is not uncommon to find variant rules that have been played for decades or generations, but only in one town. The basic areas of variation are in the number of tiles drawn per player's hand (and, accordingly, whether or not the game has a boneyard), the number of spinners, and the scoring of spinners.

Five Up—using all doubles as spinners—is the Fives Family variant most common in Spanish-speaking parts of the world. In Europe, Sniff is more common, which uses the first double as a spinner. All Fives is used to refer to two different members of the Fives Family, the first of which is also known as Muggins. Muggins is a fast-paced two-player game with no spinner that is popular in Europe. The other All Fives uses a single spinner, and up to four players. Another variant is All Fives and Threes, which changes one aspect of the Fives Family rules, giving players a score for every multiple of five and every multiple of three, a variant useful when using sets larger than the standard double six is All Odd Primes, which is just what it sounds like—points accrued for every multiple of odd prime numbers (3,5,7,13,17, etc.).

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