Domino () is a tile-based game played by two or more players. Typically, each player places a domino edge to edge against another so that the adjacent faces are either identical or form some specified total. The first player to complete the chain wins the game. The word may also refer to a series of events that follow one another like dominoes, either literally or metaphorically.
A domino effect occurs when a small event causes a greater effect than would otherwise be expected. It can occur either physically, such as when a single domino falls and knocks over a row of others, or it can occur metaphorically, when one event causes similar events to happen, for example in business, finance or politics.
Hevesh started making her own domino setups at age 10. By 20, she was a professional domino artist, working on team projects for movies, TV shows and even a Katy Perry album launch. Her YouTube channel, Hevesh5, has more than 2 million subscribers, and she’s even helped set a Guinness record for most dominoes used in a layout.
She uses a version of the engineering-design process when planning out her installations. She starts by thinking about a theme or purpose for the layout, and then brainstorms images or words that might fit with it. She then creates a rough sketch of the design and calculates how many dominoes she’ll need to make it work.
Once she’s done that, Hevesh begins laying out the dominoes on a flat surface. She may use straight lines, curved lines or grids that form pictures when they fall, or she can build 3D structures like towers and pyramids. She also draws arrows on the paper to show how she wants the dominoes to fall.
Most modern domino sets are made of pressed polymer. However, some sets are still made from natural materials such as bone, silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (“mother of pearl”), ivory or a dark hardwood such as ebony. These sets have a more elegant look and feel and are often slightly heavier than their polymer counterparts.
There are many different games that can be played with a domino set, some of which involve blocking and scoring. Other games are more abstract, such as solitaire or trick-taking. Some of these are adaptations of card games that were once popular in certain parts of the world to circumvent religious prohibitions on playing cards.
There are many extended variants of the basic double-six domino set, with each progressively larger set increasing the maximum number of pips on an end by three. Some players prefer to play with these more-extended sets, as they allow for a higher degree of strategic choice and are more fun to handle. Some of the more popular ones include double-nine, double-12, and double-15. There are also some very large sets, such as double-18, but they are rarely used for gaming. The largest known dominoes are several feet tall, and weigh hundreds of pounds.