Domino is a popular game in which players arrange a series of matching dominoes to form lines that ultimately topple. The dominoes can be arranged in straight lines, curved lines that make pictures when they fall, stacked walls, or 3D structures like towers and pyramids. The fun comes in creating elaborate tracks and watching the dominoes fall according to your design. When you want to create a track for your dominoes, it helps to draw the design on paper before building it. This allows you to figure out how many dominoes you’ll need for your design and plan out the path they’ll take when they’re set in motion.

A domino is a small, rectangular piece of wood or another material with an identifying pattern on one side and a blank or identically patterned opposite side. The identifying pattern is often made of dots, sometimes called pips, but the dominoes can also be marked with other symbols, letters, or numbers. The values on the pips range from six to none or blank, with six pips representing the highest value. The two matching ends of a domino must touch each other, and the end that is not touching must be open for play. This is why a domino is referred to as “cross-ways” when it’s positioned in a layout.

Hevesh is an accomplished domino artist whose creations have been featured on television and in museums. She’s worked on projects involving thousands of dominoes and has helped set the Guinness World Record for the most dominoes toppled in a circular arrangement. Her largest installations can take several nail-biting minutes to fall, but they all follow the laws of physics. Hevesh says that gravity is crucial to a good domino setup. When a domino is standing upright, it has potential energy based on its position, but when it falls, the potential energy turns into kinetic energy and causes other dominoes to move.

Unlike modern polymer dominoes, many old-style sets are made of natural materials such as bone, silver lip oyster shell (mother of pearl), ivory, and dark hardwoods such as ebony. These sets are typically lighter in weight than polymer sets, and they can feel more substantial in the hand. They also tend to be more expensive than the modern plastic sets.

When a player is “on point,” he or she scores points by placing a tile next to a previous tile that has already fallen. The resulting chain is then topped with a single domino that is touching the first tile in a perpendicular manner to the direction of play. This can be repeated until the player has scored all his or her points. If a player scores all the points in the layout, that person wins the game.