Dominoes, cousins of playing cards, are one of the oldest tools for game play. They have been used for thousands of years to create a wide variety of games and are often a test of patience and skill.
The most popular dominoes have 28 tiles, which are sometimes called bones, cards, men, or pieces. Each tile is marked with numbers, usually ranging from six to zero, or blank. These markings, called pips, are known as the domino’s rank. A higher ranking domino has more pips than a lower ranking one.
Dominos can be played by one, two, or many players. The basic rule of the game is to place a domino edge to edge with another domino so that their adjacent faces match either identically or form some specified total. Players continue to play this way until one player has a complete set of dominoes or the total count of all dominoes in a player’s hand is equal to some value.
Hevesh, a 20-year-old from Canada, has been creating mind-blowing domino sets since she was 10. Her YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers, and she’s worked on projects for movies, TV shows, and events. Hevesh has also helped to break a Guinness record by creating a domino setup with 76,017 dominoes.
When she begins to set up a new design, Hevesh starts with an idea for the piece and brainstorms images or words that she might want to use. She then considers how she will build the piece and what materials to use.
She also thinks about the effect she wants to have on the viewer and how the pieces will be arranged. Once she’s happy with her plan, Hevesh begins to lay the dominoes out on the table. Her best creations can take hours to set up.
As Hevesh places each domino, she must consider its inertia. A domino has a tendency to resist motion, but a tiny nudge is all it takes for that first domino to fall. Once that domino falls, much of its potential energy converts to kinetic energy-the energy of movement. Some of this energy is transmitted to the next domino, providing the push it needs to topple over. And so on, until the last domino has fallen.
The most common domino games require a double-six set. To begin the game, all 28 dominoes are shuffled and mixed face down. This pile of tiles is known as the stock or boneyard. Each player then draws seven dominoes and sets them up on the table so they can see their value, but their opponents cannot see them. The first player to make a play wins the hand and receives a score equal to the total number of dots on all his opponent’s unplayed dominoes. The second player then draws dominoes from the boneyard and continues this process until he cannot draw a single domino that matches the value of his opponent’s existing dominoes or until he has a completed set of dominoes.