Domino is a small, rectangular block used as a gaming object. It is referred to as bones, pieces, men, or stones, and comes in many different varieties of rigid material such as bone, silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (mother of pearl), ivory, or a dark hardwood such as ebony. It is covered in black or white pips that are either painted or inlaid into the piece’s surface. These pips are the markers that identify the domino’s number value.
There are 28 unique pieces in a standard double-six set of dominoes. The other ends of the dominoes are marked with a number of spots or dots, like those on a six-sided die, although some have no pips at all. This allows a total of seven possible combinations of ends, making for 28 dominoes. Larger sets can be “extended” by introducing ends with greater numbers of spots, allowing for more unique dominoes. For example, double-nine and double-12 sets have 91 and 136 dominoes respectively.
These dominoes are usually used in a game in which players try to build lines of dominoes by laying down dominoes with matching numbers of spots on both sides. The game ends when one player has completed a full horizontal or vertical line of dominoes. A game can also be played with more than two players, and in this case each domino must match the one before it or it will not fall.
In the United States, domino games are typically block and draw games for two to four players. The most basic domino games require only the traditional double-six set; however, a wide variety of variants are played with other types of dominoes, as well as with card games and solitaire-like games that were once popular in areas where religious proscriptions prohibited playing cards.
In recent years, dominoes have also been used as a teaching tool for mathematics and other subjects. A curricular version of the game, called Domino Math, involves students constructing mathematical equations with dominoes and using them to solve problems. This educational variation of the game has been shown to improve students’ spatial skills and ability to understand patterns.
A domino is also a symbolic representation of the chain reaction of events that can occur when one event leads to another, even though they are separate and unrelated events. This concept is often employed in the context of social studies, history, and world politics.
For example, a student may study the historical events that led up to and followed after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The student might use dominoes to illustrate the sequence of events and the influence that the United States had on the rest of Latin America through the so-called Domino Theory. In this theory, Richard Nixon justified the United States’ destabilization of the Salvador Allende regime in Chile by arguing that a Communist Chile and Cuba would create a red sandwich that could be entrapped between the two countries by the United States.