A domino is a mathematical polygon that consists of two equal-sized squares connected edge-to-edge. It’s also a popular game. The most common set has 28 dominoes, but larger ones are available for games with more players. Dominoes are usually played with hands, and the rules vary depending on whether the goal is to block opponents’ play or score points.
Lily Hevesh started playing with dominoes when she was 9 years old, and soon she had a massive collection. She loved setting them up in straight or curved lines and flicking the first one, watching the whole line fall, domino by domino. Now, Hevesh has more than 2 million YouTube subscribers and works as a professional domino artist, creating spectacular setups for movies, TV shows, and even events like an album launch for Katy Perry.
When you think of a domino effect, you probably imagine a scene that leads into the next, influencing it by adding tension or revealing more information. In novels, scenes are often called scene dominoes because they help advance the plot. But if you’re a pantser—that is, if you don’t outline your story ahead of time or use tools such as Scrivener to plot out the structure of your novel—you might find yourself writing scene dominoes that are ineffective on their own or don’t have enough logical impact on the scene they’re leading into.
In a recent video, University of Toronto physicist Stephen Morris demonstrated the power of dominoes. He set up 13 dominoes—one of them was five millimeters tall and only 1 millimeter thick, so small that you could barely see it with your naked eye. He then flipped the first domino and watched as the rest fell, creating a chain reaction that lasted for more than a minute.
The reason dominoes can do this is that they have inertia, a tendency to resist motion unless pushed or pulled. The force needed to overcome this inertia is relatively small: just a tiny nudge can push it over. But when a domino does fall, it releases all that potential energy into friction with its neighbors and the surface it’s on.
Most domino games involve scoring or blocking. The most common commercially available sets are double six and double nine, but progressively larger sets exist that increase the number of unique combinations of ends on each domino by adding tiles with more and more pips. For example, a double-six set has 28 tiles, while an extended set would contain 55 or 91 tiles. Most of these extension sets are used for multiplayer games and have multiple suits, such as the suit of sixes and the suit of double-blanks or 0’s. Generally, the player who scores the most points over a certain number of rounds wins. Each individual tile has a different value, but the overall total of all the matching ends makes up the score.