The domino effect is when a small action leads to big consequences. But there’s another kind of domino effect: the chain reaction that occurs when one small piece of a larger structure topples the rest of the pieces. You might have seen it in a video of someone building a complex arrangement of dominoes that finally falls with just a tiny nudge. This is the sort of thing that happens in domino shows, where builders compete to create the most impressive chains before a live audience.
Domino is a game played with small rectangular blocks called tiles, each bearing on its face an arrangement of dots or spots like those on dice. A set of 28 such tiles constitutes a domino, and the entire grouping is often called a “domino” or “dominoes.” The game can be played by two players or by one player against the computer. It is also played by large groups of people in tournaments.
The tiles are made of wood or a similar rigid material, and may be painted or decorated. They are arranged on the table to form a layout, and each turn a tile is played so that its matching end touches either an open side of a domino already placed in the layout or an adjacent tile. Some games treat both ends of a double as open, allowing additional tiles to be placed adjacent to the double so that the domino chain develops into a snake-line shape.
Each domino is part of a suit, and each piece bears a number indicating its suit on one face. The other face is blank or identically patterned, and the number of the domino determines its value. A domino can belong to more than one suit, but a single tile cannot be both a member of the suit of three and the suit of five.
A domino must be positioned so that its matching end touches either an open domino or a non-open, or “sleeping,” domino already in the layout. If the matching end is a double, it must be placed cross-ways on the other double, or straddled so that it straddles all four ends of the adjacent dominoes. If it is a single tile, it must touch both ends of the adjacent dominoes, or be “stitched up.”
Each time a domino is laid down, it passes on its number to its neighbors. When the number of tiles becomes so great that no player can advance, play stops and the winner is the partner whose partners’ combined total of pips on their remaining dominoes is the least. For many people, the best part of playing a domino game is watching a long string of falling dominoes. This is why people watch videos of the amazing chain reactions built by professionals in domino shows, and it’s why they’re so satisfying when the whole chain falls in a perfectly synchronized sequence. But for others, the appeal of a domino chain is less about its visual impact and more about the way that it makes us feel when we achieve success by means of incremental steps.