Domino – A Game of Skill and Strategy

Domino is a game of skill and strategy, played by two or more players. The pieces, called dominoes or bones, are normally twice as long as they are wide and feature a line in the middle to divide them visually into two squares, each containing dots, or pips, from one end to the other. The value of each domino is indicated by the number of pips on each side, ranging from six to zero and sometimes including blanks. The number of pips on a domino determines its rank or weight, and some games are governed by this ranking system, which is often more important than the rules of play themselves.

The game originated in the mid-18th century in Italy and France, and was introduced to England by French prisoners toward the end of that period. The most common use for Western dominoes is in positional games, where the players place a domino edge to edge against another so that the adjacent faces are either identical or form some specified total.

Besides positional games, there are many other types of domino play. The Draw Game, for example, allows players to choose from a set of sleeping dominoes. Each player draws a certain amount of tiles initially, and may pass when they cannot make a move. When all the sleeping dominoes are gone, the next player draws new tiles from the stock and adds them to the ones in his hand. In this way, the game continues until one player is unable to continue, or the number of dominoes in his hand reaches zero.

Hevesh, whose YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers, creates elaborate domino setups in three dimensions for movies, TV shows, and events such as the album launch of pop star Katy Perry. The largest of her installations take several nail-biting minutes to fall, and she takes great care in making sure the pieces work as planned. Hevesh tests each section of her creations and films them in slow motion before putting it all together.

In addition to blocking and scoring games, dominoes can also be used to play other kinds of games, usually based on skill or chance, such as solitaire or trick-taking, which were once popular as a means of circumventing religious proscriptions against card playing. More recently, there have been experiments with using dominoes to explore social and philosophical issues.

Although the word Domino is synonymous with leadership, it is not necessarily a synonym for management. In fact, many leaders are able to function without having formal authority roles. For example, Domino’s Pizza CEO Don Meij, who stars in the popular Undercover Boss series, has shown that he is able to do this effectively at the company by being more of a “player-coach” than an “enforcer.” This style of leadership emphasizes empowering employees and encouraging them to act on their own initiative. In this way, Domino’s has created a leadership structure that seems to be very successful in its customer service.