Domino is an ancient game that combines strategy, skill, and chance. It’s also an example of how tiny actions can create massive results. When you set a domino up, each subsequent tile has to fit perfectly with the previous one to prevent it from falling over. This ensures that the chain keeps developing in the desired direction and that you can play to your advantage, but it requires a lot of patience as you wait for each player’s turn.
Each domino is a square piece with a pattern of dots, called pips, on one side. The other side is blank or identically patterned. In the earliest forms of this game, the first domino had just five pips, but the modern set has many more and is used in positional games. Each domino can be played in any number of ways, but a typical strategy involves matching tiles with adjacent pips (and avoiding the ones with three or more pips) to form a line. This is done in turns, and the winner is whoever has the most total points.
Depending on the type of domino you have, some may be printed with different pips or even no pips at all, but most are printed with the same sequence of numbers. This means that if you have a large set, it’s easy to identify the pieces and determine what they will do when you play them.
When you set up a series of dominoes, the weight of each subsequent tile is determined by its size and the distance from the center point of the last domino in the row. This is important because the higher the center of gravity, the harder it is to tip the piece forward. But once it starts moving, a domino’s potential energy quickly converts to kinetic energy, and that push travels down the row until all the dominoes have fallen.
Dominoes can be played alone or with several players. In positional games, each player takes turns placing a domino edge-to-edge with another one until they reach their destination, such as the end of a line. The rules vary among games, but usually a player has to place a domino of the same type to continue playing, or “chip out” by playing their final tile. The other players must then chip in to replace that domino.
Hevesh is an expert at building mind-blowing domino setups, and her YouTube channel, Hevesh5, has more than 2 million subscribers. She uses a variation of the engineering-design process to plan and create each setup, and she’s worked on projects involving hundreds of thousands of dominoes. Her most complex arrangements can take several nail-biting minutes to fall, but they all work the same way: a single domino triggers a cascade of events that progress toward a goal. This is how stories work, too. Each scene advances the hero closer to or farther from their goal, but it’s crucial that the scenes don’t drag out too long or bore readers.