November 11, 2024
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Experts in this article:
Sophia is a software QA Tester and web developer with experience testing multiple survey and task apps. She has two years of...
Jessica is a writer for SideHustles.com. Her side hustles include freelance academic writing and editing, which she's done for...
Dominoes Gold is an app you can use to play the classic board game of dominoes and compete to win real-world prizes. The game’s App Store page calls it “insanely addicting” and “fast-paced,” but does it actually deliver the cash windfalls it promises?
We sent our tester to find out.
Dominoes Gold is an app made by Grey Square Games. It’s available through the mobile gaming platform Skillz.
As of July 2024, the app has a rating of 4.7 and almost 29,257 reviews on the App Store (for iOS devices). In the Samsung Galaxy store, it has a rating of 4.5 and 2,478 reviews.
Yes, Dominoes Gold pays real money—at least in theory. It’s a legitimate app, not a scam, and if you win enough games, you can withdraw cash in the form of a check or a payment via credit or debit card, PayPal, or Apple Pay.
However, to make money, you have to actually win games—and to play them at all, you have to pay entry fees. If you deposit money and you lose more than you win, you’ll consequently end up spending more than you make.
We spent about 2½ hours playing Dominoes Gold, and we invested $5 of our hard-earned cash paying entry fees for tournaments. At the end of our testing marathon, our balance was $7.92, but we only received $6.42 after paying a $1.50 withdrawal fee.
It’s nice that we ended up making money instead of losing it (something that, in our experience, is relatively rare with apps like this), but we ultimately only earned $1.42 for over two hours of effort, which is a relatively poor return.
Even if you manage to make more than we did on Dominoes Gold, you probably won’t earn enough for this to be a viable second income stream.
Unless you’re just in it for fun, you’ll be much better off spending time on a more conventional side hustle. This will also protect you from the very real risk of losing money.
No, you technically don’t have to pay to play Dominoes Gold. You can stick to playing practice games, which are free to enter. However, these don’t give you cash prizes (or credits you can use to play in cash tournaments).
If you want to compete in cash tournaments, you may be able to do so without paying. There are (free) ways to earn in-app credits, which you can use to enter games with cash prizes.
However, we’re not sure that this is actually a practical option; your rewards-earning opportunities may be limited if you strategically avoid spending anything on the app. Although we got quite a lot of “Ticketz” (credits) from completing in-app tasks, it’s possible Dominoes Gold wouldn’t have been so generous if we hadn’t also spent real money.
Our hunch is that most players eventually end up forking over cash. After all, if they didn’t, the app wouldn’t be profitable.
The aim of this game is to get rid of as many dominoes as possible by placing them strategically on a board.
When you play in tournaments, you’ll compete with other players. However, the other player in your match won’t usually be the person you’re competing against in the tournament. Instead, in tournaments, participants generally play against bots. Whoever earns a higher score against their bot wins.
Confusingly, winning your match doesn’t always guarantee that your score will be better, even if your (human) opponent also loses to their own bot. It’s possible for you to win your match, for your human opponent to lose theirs, and for you to still lose the tournament.
If you and the other human player both get the same score, you’ll play a tiebreaker match.
Tournaments can also have multiple rounds when they’re bracket tournaments (where there are more than two human competitors).
When you start a new game, you and the other player get seven dominoes (or “bones”) each.
The app chooses who will go first according to who has the highest “double.” Doubles are dominoes that have two sides with the same number of pips (dots). The owner of this double has to play that domino first.
If no one has any doubles, the player with the “heaviest” domino starts, where the heaviest one is the one with the most pips.
The first player plays a domino by dragging it onto the board. The next player must then place another domino next to it that has at least one side marked with a corresponding number of pips, so that the two matching sides touch.
As this is somewhat confusing—at least for people who’ve never played dominoes before—we’ll show you a couple of examples below.
In this example, the first domino has one side with six pips and another with five. The second domino has one side with five pips and another with a single pip; it must be placed so that the side with five touches the corresponding side on the other domino.
In the next example, the new domino has a side with six pips touching one with two sixes. Because the six on the new domino matches both sides of the old domino, it’s positioned such that the “closed” end of the new domino touches the center of the old one (although the app may change the exact contact points slightly to fit the board).
Most of the dominoes on the board will only have two “open” ends that can connect with other dominoes. Only the “spinner” has four ends it can connect with other dominoes. The spinner is the first double played during a game—meaning it’s often (but not always) the first domino played.
If none of your dominoes are playable (i.e., none of their sides match any dominoes already on the board), you have to draw new pieces from the “boneyard” (the remaining, unused dominoes) until you have one you can play. If the boneyard runs out of dominoes, you have to pass your turn.
You’ll score points if, after your move, the numbers on the open ends of the dominoes on the board add up to a multiple of five. If they do, you’ll score points equal to whatever their total sum is.
Note that only two open ends of the spinner are counted. After two (out of four) ends of the spinner are closed, you won’t be able to score any more points from that domino.
The screenshot below shows a move that scores 5 points. There are two open ends in the game, which have 4 pips and 1 pip, for a total of 5.
There are also ways you can score points at the end of a Dominoes Gold game. If your opponent still has dominoes left, you’ll get the total number of pips in their hand added to your score.
Dominoes Gold matches are sometimes divided into multiple games. A game ends when one of these conditions is met:
When the game ends, all the dominoes will be cleared from the board and you’ll start over.
The match as a whole will go on until either you or your opponent scores 100 points, or the time limit for the match runs out (if there is one). Whoever has the most points at the end is the winner.
To enter Dominoes Gold tournaments, you have to pay entry fees. The types of credits you can use for the entry fees will depend partly on the type of game you want to play (i.e., practice games or cash games).
Dominoes Gold has three different types of credits you can earn and spend on the app:
To win real money on Dominoes Gold, you have to enter and win cash tournaments. However, you need to pay entry fees to join these. In general, the more you pay for entry fees, the larger the prizes you stand to win will be.
We saw Dominoes Gold tournaments with entry fees ranging from $0.60 to $4.50, and we saw prize pools ranging from $1 to $90. In general, we stuck to the lower-stakes tournaments to avoid losing too much money.
In total, we spent about 2½ hours trying to win cash (and earning credits to enter cash tournaments). This included four practice tournaments we played to get accustomed to the rules.
However, we were more interested in the results of our cash tournaments. Here’s what happened in those games:
As well as cash, these tournaments also gave us Ticketz and other types of prizes to use in the Dominoes Gold app. Overall, we spent $5 and ended up with $6.42 ($7.92 minus fees), meaning that we made a profit of $1.42—not the most lucrative couple of hours we’ve ever spent, although better than nothing.
Aside from cash tournaments, Dominoes Gold has many other tasks you can complete to earn in-app credits. Although you can’t earn money directly from these, you can use these credits to enter tournaments and potentially win cash prizes.
You can also transfer your credits from other games on the Skillz platform to Dominoes Gold.
Here are some of the tasks you can try to earn in-app credits:
The Daily Challenge is a task you can complete on Dominoes Gold to earn extra rewards each day. The type of challenge and the prize you’ll win will depend on how many days you use the app in a row, as shown in the screenshot below.
You can also see that the rewards often only comprise Zs (for entering practice games), so they’re not always useful.
We completed the Dominoes Gold Daily Challenge on several occasions, but we only ever won Zs.
Like many similar gaming apps, Dominoes Gold offers you Login Bonuses every day you open the app. This will net you free rewards (usually Zs or Ticketz).
To get your Login Bonus, go to the “Store” tab and click on “Login Bonus.”
We collected the Login Bonus on several occasions. Usually, we just got Z coins, but sometimes we got Ticketz. The best reward we got was 78 Ticketz.
You have to play several games to unlock the leaderboard on Dominoes Gold. Once you do this, you can view the feature by clicking on the “Leagues” tab.
The leaderboard ranks the Dominoes Gold players who have the most medals (yet another type of reward you can earn for playing games).
If you make the leaderboard, you can win prizes that may include Zs, Ticketz, or cash.
Our account history showed that we won 1,100 Ticketz in total from our leaderboard rankings.
Another way to earn extra rewards on Dominoes Gold is by graduating through the tiers shown in the screenshot below.
We didn’t go beyond the Bronze tier on Dominoes Gold, so we didn’t get any extra rewards from this feature.
On Dominoes Gold, you can win trophies by passing in-game milestones, such as playing or winning a certain number of matches.
When you redeem your trophies (which you have to do manually), you can get credits, real cash, and Bonus Cash. In our experience, Ticketz and Z coins are most common.
We claimed a number of trophies while playing Dominoes Gold. These included the ones shown in the screenshot below. One of these gave us $1 in Bonus Cash, which is the best prize we’ve gotten from a trophy so far while testing Skillz games.
The other trophy gave us 5 Ticketz, which is the type of prize we’re more accustomed to seeing.
Skillz runs sweepstakes for users of Dominoes Gold—and its other games—that usually have prizes of Bonus Cash.
This is one of the hardest ways to earn credits on Skillz apps, as you have to simply cross your fingers and hope for the best.
To check the sweepstake results and see if you were picked, go to the main menu on the app, click on “FAQs,” then go to “Special Events” to see a list of winners’ usernames.
Sadly, we didn’t win any prizes from sweepstakes on Dominoes Gold.
Apps like Dominoes Gold sometimes share promo codes on their social media pages or via email or push notifications that give you free rewards.
You can find a place to enter these codes in the “Store” tab; click on “Enter Promo Code.”
We checked our email on several occasions to look for Dominoes Gold promo codes, but we didn’t find any. We also looked for codes on social media, but we didn’t have any luck with that, either.
If you refer a friend to Dominoes Gold, you’ll get $1 when they use your promo code to make their first deposit on the app. They will also get $1.
It’s not clear whether there’s a limit to the number of people you can invite or if you can get the $1 in Bonus Cash an unlimited number of times.
We didn’t refer any friends to Dominoes Gold, so we didn’t benefit from this feature.
Here’s what you need to know to start playing Dominoes Gold.
You can visit the Dominoes Gold page on the Skillz platform to scan a QR code that will prompt you to download the app for iOS or Android devices.
Alternatively, you can use the buttons below to visit the page for Dominoes Gold in the App Store or the Samsung Galaxy store.
We discourage people from betting real money on Dominoes Gold games. However, if you decide to do this, there are several payment methods available:
The screenshot below shows the various denominations you can choose from.
As you can see, when you put down larger deposits, you’ll sometimes get freebies in the form of extra Bonus Cash. This is supposed to encourage you to spend more. However, we suggest resisting the urge to splurge and sticking to the free features that Dominoes Gold offers.
Withdrawing money from the Dominoes Gold app can be complicated. It also sometimes involves fees and can potentially take a long time.
Yes, there are sometimes fees for Dominoes Gold withdrawals. You’ll pay a fee of $1.50 if you withdraw any amount under $10.
As such, it’s not ideal to withdraw small amounts from the app, since you’ll lose a large proportion of your money.
Dominoes Gold doesn’t specify any minimum threshold you have to meet to withdraw cash from the app. However, since there’s a $1.50 fee on small withdrawals, you’ll need a balance of at least $1.51 before you can withdraw anything.
According to one Dominoes Gold help page, withdrawals can take up to 6 weeks to go through. However, when we made our withdrawal from the app, we got our money the same day (in the form of two payments to the card we originally used for making our deposit).
The time your Dominoes Gold withdrawal takes may depend on various factors, such as:
Although you’re likely to get your money in less than 6 weeks, it’s best not to count on it, just in case.
Yes, there’s one other important thing you should know about withdrawing money on Dominoes Gold: you will forfeit all of your Bonus Cash whenever you do it. All of the other gaming apps we’ve tried have been the same in this respect, but that doesn’t make this problem any less irksome, since it heavily disincentivizes cashing out.
Anyone who’s 18 years of age or older can play Dominoes Gold, but not everyone can pay to play games, as this is effectively gambling, which is banned in several states.
You can’t use Dominoes Gold to play cash games in: 1
Dominoes Gold isn’t the only way to get paid for playing games. Consider checking out these other options:
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