You ever obsess over a background detail in Star Trek so much that you end up writing an entire ruleset for a game that technically never had one?

Welcome to Dom-Jot, space pool’s rowdier, meaner cousin, played with flashing bumpers, colored balls, and usually one Nausicaan ready to stab you for winning.

Fans caught glimpses of it in TNG: “Tapestry” and more recently in Lower Decks: “We’ll always have Tom Paris”, but no official rules ever surfaced. What we got instead were flashing lights, loud bets, and a young Picard getting impaled for talking smack. That’s canon, folks.

So I decided to fix that.

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🧠 What Is Dom-Jot?

In-universe, Dom-Jot is a betting game played on a hybrid pool/pinball-like table. There’s no rack. No cue ball. Just chaos. The table lights up. Balls get smashed into bumpers. Latium changes hands mid-turn. Someone always shouts “Dom-Jot!” like they’re declaring war.

But even with repeated appearances, the actual rules have never been explained. Until now.

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🧩 Reconstructing the Game from Canon

Here’s what I pulled straight from TNG and Lower Decks:

• There are multiple colored balls (red, green, yellow, purple – two of each in TNG & Lower Decks)
• There’s one blue ball and one clear (TNG shows a clear one but Lower Decks shows an extra green ball with a thick clear shell, which for the purposes of the rule-set I made up will also be the same as the clear ball from TNG)
• Players strike balls directly — no cue ball in sight
• Bumpers light up randomly, and seem to affect scoring
• Wagers are placed mid-game, usually at the start of turns

So I synthesized all of it into a complete, playable format.

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📜 The Rule-set

I’m calling this version the Electronic Table Variant, complete with Starfleet-style classifications, point structure, betting mechanics, and made a PDF that looks like it came straight out of the Stellar Recreation Authority.

Here’s what’s inside:

• A full breakdown of gameplay, turn flow, and scoring
• Blue and clear ball mechanics
• Betting rules using the Kozar’Gar Betting Rail (at least that’s the made up name I gave the slots at the edge of the table)
• Visual schematic of the table based on multiple screen appearances

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📥 Download the Ruleset:

DOM-JOT_Ruleset_OfficialDownload

Print it. Frame it. Challenge a Nausicaan to a rematch. Just don’t forget to turn off the auto-cheat detection first.

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🪐 Final Thoughts

Dom-Jot was never meant to be “just pool.” It’s a loud, chaotic, slightly rigged, absolutely brilliant piece of background worldbuilding. And now? It’s playable.

This is for everyone who’s ever paused Trek to figure out how the fake games work. For the fans who ask “why” and then answer it themselves.

You play Dom-Jot, human?

Now you can.