A small wood or plastic block, the face of which is marked with an arrangement of spots resembling those on dice. It is also sometimes called a domino block, although this word is more often used to describe the game played with them. Dominoes are arranged in a line, and one is placed on top of another, so that when the first is tapped ever-so-lightly, the entire string falls in a smooth cascade. Dominoes can be set up in straight or curved lines, and many different types of games can be played with them.
Lily Hevesh started collecting dominoes at age 9 and loved setting them up in a row, flicking the first one and watching them fall. That passion led her to start her YouTube channel, Hevesh5, where she now has more than 2 million subscribers and builds mind-blowing domino constructions for events, TV shows and movies.
Hevesh follows a process when creating her sets that is similar to the engineering-design approach. She starts by thinking about the theme or purpose of the installation and brainstorming images or words that might be associated with it. Next, she plans how to make the piece functionally, physically and aesthetically. Finally, she begins to sketch out the individual pieces and how they will be connected.
The word domino comes from a Latin phrase meaning “flip over.” It has been used since the mid-18th century to refer to a small rectangular block with a mark on each side that resembles the spots on a die. A larger version of the domino, the tumbling blocks, has been in use since the 17th century. Dominoes were used as a form of gambling and entertainment, both in Africa and Europe.
In addition to being used for gambling, the domino is also a popular puzzle. It is usually stacked in two layers and divided by a line or ridge into squares with identifying marks on each. These markings, which are normally in the form of dots or numbers, indicate the value of each end (or the squares they occupy), with a domino’s total score of spots being its rank. Some larger dominoes have additional markings such as Arabic numerals, and some extended sets have more than the usual 28 tiles (such as double-nine or double-12).
A variety of different games can be played with a set of dominoes, with the most common being blocking and scoring ones. In blocking games such as matador and chicken foot, players empty their hands by playing all of their dominoes; in scoring games such as bergen and muggins, points are scored by counting the pips on each losing player’s remaining dominoes. Some domino games duplicate card-playing, and were once popular in areas that had religious restrictions against cards.
Domino is an open platform that enables you to scale how you work by connecting and accessing your favorite languages, IDEs, data sources and tools through a single integration catalog. It is available as a self-managed on-premises solution and as a fully managed cloud service.