Dominoes are square, flat tiles featuring an arrangement of dots called pips on one side and blank or identical patterns on the other. Dominoes may be composed of natural materials like bone, silver lip oyster shell (mother of pearl), ivory, or ebony; alternatively they may be formed using polymer clay to resemble stone, marble, wood and other solid substances. Pips may either be raised from their surfaces to stand out easily against their background tiles, or painted or otherwise highlighted for easy recognition by means such as bright colors glaze or paint-upping for easy recognition by humans.
A domino has two ends, each featuring six or more pips, and its value can be determined by its rank or weight – the sum of all values on both sides. A tile with more pips is generally more valuable.
The most popular domino variant involves two players and a double-six set of 28 tiles, which is then shuffled and organized into a stock or boneyard before each player draws seven tiles for his hand from it – additional tiles from the stock may be drawn at their discretion, though additional ones cannot be drawn unless needed to build hands more quickly than seven are drawn at random from it. After placing their hands face down in front of them so they only see their own tiles but not those belonging to other players, play begins!
When playing dominoes, each new domino joins an existing row by matching its open end with the number of pip on an adjacent tile – this arrangement is known as the line of play or layout and basic instructions are outlined here in our article, Line of Play.
As dominoes become longer, it becomes harder to distinguish the pips. Many large sets use both traditional pips and Arabic numerals that can make reading them easier.
Consider dominoes as engineering designs: when one is placed on a grid and nudged by a player, energy travels along its chain until finally one topples over.
Before playing dominoes, each player shuffles and thoroughly mixes the tiles by moving them with his hand. Shuffling may be divided among players or left up to one person alone for every game; once one game has concluded, its winner draws his hand for another round.
Hevesh creates stunning domino setups, and her work has inspired some of the articles on this website about dominoes. When planning her designs, Hevesh takes an engineering-design process approach when planning each new layout: starting from brainstorming images or words associated with her theme before developing a system to simulate domino effects with arrows indicating where each domino should fall.