To the nines!

L ouis Cardona lays down his double-nine domino and glances at his partner across the table. The first few moves are reserved and thoughtful, with casual smiles lingering between plays. It is a slow start to a fast game, and before long, the group is slapping high fives and hurling trash talk back and forth.

For Cardona, a 24-year-old University of Florida graduate, the game is as much a part of his heritage as it is a weeknight routine. Growing up with Miami 's Cuban community, he says, dominoes was something "everybody played, not just the old folks. . . . Over there it's totally cool to be 10 years old and sitting at a table playing with your grandparents."

Now, three years after swapping climates, Cardona is working to bring that enthusiasm to Mission Hill and a crowd of young people who find themselves in the limbo land of being too old for fraternity parties yet too young for dinner parties.

Cardona, who works for an investment firm downtown, has been leading weekly games at Penguin Pizza on Huntington Avenue since January . The series has drawn about two-dozen regulars to the open-air bar, which often features a steady flow of customers from nearby colleges and universities.

Adjusting to a postcollegiate lifestyle can take some getting used to for a demographic suddenly forced to look beyond student centers and campus activities for rounding out their social calendars.

Nearly half of all college students in the Boston area stay in the city after graduation, according to a 2003 study by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce; 2000 statistics from a Boston Redevelopment Authority report showed one-third of the Hub's population falling within the 20-to-34-year-old bracket .

Contrary to the pervasive hand-wringing about young adults deserting the Hub for more affordable lifestyles, the BRA found Boston second only to Austin, Texas, among the nation's major cities, percentage-wise, in its 20-to-34-year-old population.

Cardona says he struggled to find his niche. "Like most people who are out of college and move to a new place, I didn't know a lot of folks," he says. Dusting off his set of double-nines, Cardona pulled other people in by sticking to what he did know: Cuban dominoes .

As his New Year's resolution, after having lackluster results making friends in his fresh setting, Cardona started posting notices of games online, searching for other recent graduates interested in tossing the tiles around. He says that's how he found most of his league's members.

The tactic is a common move for someone facing his dilemma, according to Abigail Brooks , a Boston College doctoral student in sociology , whose master's thesis focused on how young adults approach meeting people their own age after graduating college.

Campus life, she says, is seen by many "as an oasis, this built-in, ready-made community" that disappears after graduation, and reaching out online "has almost become the norm" for filling the void.

Setting up shop in Mission Hill was a slow process at first, Cardona says. "But once people came and it became an established group, they were almost guaranteed to come back and also very likely to tell their friends."

On a recent Tuesday night, as he waited for the game to begin, Rick Cruz admits he was a bit skeptical when he read about the group online, but the 22-year-old University of Arizona graduate now says it's been "one of the ways I've been able to branch out.

"I didn't know what it would be like or what the crowd would be like, and whether it would be my type of friends," he says. "But after coming here, I can see that they're people I can get along with."

Tufts University graduate Jake Hirsh berg , 23 , says he's "still pretty new to the scene" after playing for two months. "I'm not like best friends with everyone, obviously, but it's definitely something fun to do once a week and hang out with people."

While being Cuban isn't a prerequisite of enjoying the game, dominoes is "definitely an old tradition that the first Cubans brought," says Susan Eckstein , a sociology professor at Boston University who has studied Cuba and how transitional ties with Cuban-Americans are changing the island.

In Little Havana, an ethnic enclave in Cardona's hometown, "one of the things that you can see is that they'll go for coffee and they'll also play dominoes," Eckstein says in a phone interview last week . "It's a place where Cubans, particularly men, go to keep this tradition alive."

Cultural associations aside, Cuban dominoes is one of more than 80 varieties of the tile game that are played throughout the world. While standard domino sets range anywhere from zero to six spots, also called pips, on each half, Cardona's favorite has nine .

Two teams of two players compete, with each player using 10 tiles to try to block the nearest opponent from making a move. Unlike in traditional dominoes, the remaining pieces are considered out of play, and players in a jam must pass the turn rather than draw a new tile.

"Once a player begins to grasp the game, strategies become more apparent," Cardona says. "It looks like a little tile game but it can be pretty ruthless."

After four months of exhibition play here, nearly a semester by collegiate standards, he put the theory to the test by rounding up a dozen players and organizing his first tournament, which kicked off earlier this month .

Players started trickling in around eight o'clock, grabbing slices of pizza and catching up with one another. A half-hour later, Cardona walked through the room, shuffling through tables and chairs while holding a manila envelope filled with thin slips of paper for players to draw and pick teams.

Soon enough, salt shakers and pepper grinders were cleared away, empty plates were taken to the bar, and all that was left on three round, wooden tables were the dominoes, their holders, and a couple bottles of beer.

As bar patrons filled the half-dozen seats and watched the Red Sox take on the Athletics, many glanced over periodically and took in the tile spectacle, which lasted for more than four hours. Others studied the game during a walk to the bathroom or on their way out the door.

"It's just a really eccentric and interesting group of people," says Kristina Costanzo , 24 . "I don't know why exactly, but people from all over have been coming, all around my age and pretty well-educated, so it's just a really interesting group."

Costanzo, one of six or seven women who play regularly, says it's taken "a lot of legwork" to make friends locally since graduating from college in Florida three years ago and moving to Brighton . She says she "really lucked out" with the league.

"I think the people are what makes it different," she says. "They really get into it. Some players really trash-talk each other, and that wouldn't fly in Miami."

Sitting nearby, Elena Muench , 24 , caught some of the rivalry first-hand as she ate pasta with a friend.

"We come in a lot during the week and we've never seen domino playing, or any sort of game going on. It's cool," Muench says. "I think it's a neat way to spend your Tuesday night."

Richard Thompson can be reached at rthompson@globe.com.