The Games That Built the Yorkshire Pub, and the Ones That Replaced Them

For a long time a Yorkshire pub was measured by more than its beer. It was judged on its games. The dominoes school in the corner, the darts board with its own following, the cribbage board worn smooth by decades of hands, the whist drives that filled a back room on a wet Tuesday. The pub was where the county played, and a landlord who let the games lapse lost more than a bit of atmosphere.

A good deal of that casual play has since drifted away from the bar. People who once turned out for a dominoes league now pass the evening at home, and the back rooms that hosted whist drives are quieter than they were. The games have not vanished, but they face competition they never used to, and it is worth remembering what they were before they fade any further.

Dominoes, the quiet county sport

Dominoes is the one that ran deepest. Pub leagues have organised across Yorkshire for generations, with teams playing home and away much like any football side and a seriousness outsiders rarely expect from a game of spotted tiles. It was cheap, it was sociable, and it gave a regular a reason to turn up on a night when nothing else was on.

Darts, cards and the back-room ritual

Around the dominoes grew everything else. Darts had its own etiquette and its own local heroes. Card schools ran on whist and crib. The back room, that slightly colder space beyond the main bar, existed largely to host all of it, from the quiz to the meat raffle to the games that never made it anywhere near television.

The stranger, older stuff

Yorkshire also kept games that barely survive today. Chief among them was knur and spell, a Pennine pastime sometimes called the poor man’s golf, in which a small ball was flicked into the air and struck across a moor as far as a player could manage. It drew crowds in the mill towns and now clings on through the occasional revival, a reminder of how local, and how odd, play once was.

The flutter that moved online

For all the talk of dominoes and darts, the pub was also where Yorkshire had its small flutter. A hand of cards played for coppers, a bet on the arrows, the sweepstake pinned up behind the bar on a Saturday. That instinct has not gone anywhere, but it has moved almost entirely onto the phone, and of all the old pub habits it is the one the internet has swallowed most completely.

Someone minded to have a go now compares licensed sites to find the best in 2026 rather than taking the landlord’s word for it, a quieter and more private version of a very old pastime.

None of which means the old ways were better, only that they were ours. The dominoes school and the crib board built something a phone struggles to replace, which is a reason to be in the room with other people on an ordinary night. Plenty of Yorkshire pubs still keep the boards behind the bar. It is worth asking for them, before the only place left to play is a screen.