What’s Behind the Domino Game?
Domino is a game played with rectangular pieces called dominoes. Each domino has one to six dots—called pips—on each end. A player lays down a domino that matches the value of a piece already on the board. Then, that domino triggers the fall of all the other tiles, which in turn trigger the fall of more tiles until the entire line of the dominoes has fallen. This process is repeated over and over, with the goal being to get as many of your opponents’ tiles falling as possible before they do so to yours.
While most people know how to play the domino game, few understand what’s behind the scenes of such a simple-seeming piece of hardware. It turns out that a domino is quite complicated, and has been used in various applications for centuries, including a form of divination. The word itself was derived from the Latin dominus, meaning “lord, master.”
The first dominoes were developed in the 12th or 13th century, although it is not known exactly when the game originated. In China, early dominoes were functionally identical to playing cards, which were also popular at the time. The game was later adopted by the Islamic world and spread throughout Europe. By the 16th century, there were several different games that involved dominoes.
A domino is a small rectangular piece of wood with six to eight round, square or oval-shaped pips on each side. Each domino is a part of a larger set, which is arranged into rows or columns and flipped over to reveal the pips. The most common domino sets have a total of 28 tiles, which are shuffled and placed face down to form a stock or boneyard. The players then draw seven tiles from the stock and place them in front of them. When the players lay down a matching domino, they win a number of points equal to the sum of the pips on their tiles.
After a career as a mercenary, mutant Domino joined the X-Force team and was co-leader of the group during the Age of Apocalypse when Earth was accidentally overlapped with Reality-295. She was subsequently asked to help train a new team and helped them to restructure their organization, albeit reluctantly. Later, she reunited with former Six Pack teammates Grizzly and Hammer, and worked alongside the feral X-Man Deadpool on a mission in Uruguay.
Artist Hevesh has been assembling and building dominoes for years, and now she’s a professional, creating massive domino setups for movies and events. Hevesh’s YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers, and she’s worked on projects involving hundreds of thousands of dominoes. She’s even helped set a Guinness World Record for the largest domino setup that took multiple nail-biting minutes to fall. Hevesh uses her skills to show off the beauty of dominoes—but there’s a deeper message behind her work as well. Just like dominoes, some learning challenges can impact students in ways that are difficult to see until the moment they aren’t succeeding. Compensating for those issues can lead to a cognitive overload that can cause a slow domino effect where students stop progressing on the basic skills they need to thrive.