Domino, also known as dominoes, is a game of skill and strategy that has been enjoyed for centuries. From professional domino game competition to building mind-boggling domino sets for public display, these cousins of playing cards offer a wide variety of games and tests of skill and patience. Each domino is a rectangular piece of rigid material, often bone or ivory, with one side bearing an arrangement of dots or pips that resembles those on a die. The other face is blank or identically patterned. The pips are sometimes coloured (e.g., black or white) and sometimes painted, to distinguish the domino from other similar pieces. Traditionally, dominoes have been made of dark hardwood such as ebony with contrasting pips or a lighter colour that is inlaid or carved. More recently, natural materials such as marble, granite, soapstone and a variety of other hardwoods; metals such as brass or pewter; and even ceramic clay have been used.
Most domino games involve emptying your hand of all but the dominoes that match the ones you have already played, or scoring by counting the pips on lost tiles, such as in bergen and muggins. Blocking games, in which opponents try to stop the other from playing, are also popular, as are Mexican train and other alternating-player games in which you build a chain of dominoes by placing matching pieces in rows on the edge of the table.
When you place the first domino on a line of hundreds or thousands of unmoving dominoes, it takes a great deal of potential energy to push that domino past its tipping point. But once it has, the potential energy is converted to kinetic energy—the energy of motion—and that force is transmitted to the next domino, providing enough of a push to cause it to fall over. The process continues, domino to domino, until the last domino has fallen.
Hevesh, whose YouTube channel Hevesh5 has more than 2 million subscribers, builds stunning domino installations for events and movies. Her largest setups take several nail-biting minutes to complete and require her to use thousands of dominoes. In a video that has gone viral, she explains how she designs her domino creations using a simplified version of the engineering-design process.
Whether you draft a novel off the cuff or use an outline, the process of plotting is fundamentally the same: you ask yourself what happens next and how that might happen. Understanding the domino effect will help you answer these questions in a way that is engaging and compelling to readers. Whether the story is about a robbery that goes wrong or a character who finds herself in trouble, following this formula will allow you to construct an intricate, dynamic tale of conflict and resolution. Here are a few tips to get you started. 1. Begin by considering the character’s goal and the obstacles he or she must overcome. 2. Consider the impact that each event might have on other characters, if any. 3. Think about how your protagonist might react to these events and how that reaction could change the character’s goal.