Domino is a game that builds core maths skills and encourages strategic thinking. It can also be a fun way to learn about the physical world and how objects interact. The game has long been a favorite of young children. The more sophisticated sets allow the player to create complex patterns and structures that require patience and precise hand movements.
Dominoes are flat rectangular pieces of material, normally twice as wide as they are tall. They are divided visually into two squares, or “ends,” and each end of a domino is marked with a different arrangement of dots, called pips, from the other. The pips on the ends of a domino indicate its rank or value, which is indicated by the number of pips it has. A domino with more pips is usually described as heavier than one with fewer pips.
In a typical domino game, players set up a line of dominoes in a straight or curved shape. The first domino is then flipped over, triggering the rest of the dominoes to fall over in careful sequence. The more dominoes in the chain, the bigger the effect when the last domino falls. Domino shows feature builders creating spectacular chains and effects for a live audience.
This sort of chain reaction is known as the domino effect, and it has proven to be surprisingly powerful. A 1983 study by University of British Columbia physics professor Lorne Whitehead demonstrated that the largest domino, which was about three feet in height, could knock over an object one-and-a-half times its size.
Lily Hevesh, 20, a professional domino artist with more than 2 million YouTube subscribers, has been setting up and falling impressive displays since she was a child. Her large installations, which can contain hundreds of thousands of dominoes in a single setup, take several nail-biting minutes to complete and may need a few tries to get them all to fall perfectly. She makes test versions of each section of an installation and films them in slow motion, so she can see exactly what needs to be corrected when the final version is ready to be filmed.
She uses a variety of materials and methods to produce her works, including 3D structures and curved lines that form pictures when they fall. She spends hours planning her designs before she starts putting them together. She then tests each section individually to make sure it will work before she begins laying them out on the floor.
Most games are played with a standard domino set, which contains 28 tiles, seven doubles (two identically patterned ends from a double blank to a double six) and 21 singles (one end has a number and the other is blank). There are many variations of domino games, but most are based on scoring points by placing your dominoes so they touch: one’s touching ones, two’s touching two’s, etc. In partnership play, you add the total score of the opponents’ dominoes to your own, rounded up to the nearest multiple of five.