Domino has a reputation for being a fun and challenging game that involves careful planning. However, there’s also a side to the game that relies on an important physical phenomenon. Watch this video about domino artist Hevesh, who creates incredible designs with dominoes that are toppled by the laws of physics. Hevesh works on projects involving up to 300,000 dominoes and says one physical force is crucial to creating such complicated setups: gravity. Gravity pulls the domino up and down, causing it to topple over and start a chain reaction of dominoes.
Domino is a tile-based board game in which players take turns placing dominoes on the table so that each one has a matching end to an adjacent tile, forming a chain of ‘nodes’ (or ‘links’) that grows in length as more tiles are added. Each domino has a number of dots called ‘pips’ on it, indicating the value that the tile may have when placed in the chain. A domino can have either two or four pips, and it may be colored white, black, or a mixture of both colors. A domino is normally twice as long as it is wide.
In most games, a single tile may only be played to an open end. A ‘double’ is a tile with two matching ends and can be placed in the chain to allow additional tiles to be played in a cross-ways direction, straddling the two ends of the domino that it is connected to. A double enables a chain to develop in a snake-like shape, as shown in the diagram below.
A domino’s value is determined by the number of pips it has, and its rank is indicated by the number of pips that it has in total. If a player plays a domino that causes the chain to become unbalanced and is not able to continue play, the player “chips out”, and play passes to the opposing team.
Historically, dominoes were made from natural materials such as bone, silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (mother of pearl), ivory or dark hardwoods like ebony, with contrasting black or white pips painted on them. Modern polymer domino sets are available as well. Some sets are also available with Arabic numerals instead of pips, which can make them easier to read for older players or those unfamiliar with dominoes.
Interestingly, Domino’s business model has taken inspiration from another iconic brand that uses technology to drive sales: Tinder. In fact, this popular dating app is said to see a 20% increase in activity on Valentine’s Day. This is perhaps a fitting tribute to the company’s founder, Frank Domino, who used an innovative system to streamline his steel production in the 1880s. He instructed employees to prioritize tasks by ranking them, and the most important task received their full attention until completion. The result was a highly efficient production process that enabled the company to scale and dominate its industry. It is this same underlying principle that has driven the success of Domino’s modern day delivery systems and online ordering capabilities.