The Domino Effect

Dominoes are a mesmerizing sight, with a carefully built line of hundreds or even thousands of dominoes all waiting for the tiny nudge of just one more to fall. They demonstrate the power of a chain reaction and are the basis for many games played by children. They also remind us of the domino effect that is at work in real life, where a small event can have profound consequences.

The word domino is used to describe any type of game that involves arranging dominoes or other tiles in rows, columns, or squares. Most popularly, they are arranged to form straight lines or parallelograms, although some people make elaborate and imaginative designs using them. A person who creates such a domino set is called a domino artist. Hevesh, a well-known domino artist, has more than 2 million YouTube subscribers and has worked on large projects such as the album launch for Katy Perry.

Most domino games involve two players and use a double-six domino set with 28 dominoes, plus a boneyard (also known as a tin). The dominoes are shuffled and the first player draws seven dominoes from the boneyard. They then draw more dominoes from the boneyard if they have none with matching values. The players alternate drawing and playing their tiles, until either one wins by playing all of his or her tiles, or both players cannot play any more tiles.

Dominos have been around since the 17th century, when they were made of wood and used as a counting tool to determine winning numbers in card games. They are also used as a way to teach basic math. The dominoes, which look like playing cards with a grid of dots on them, have identifying marks, often an arrangement of spots called pips, on one side and blank or identically patterned on the other. The pips are usually printed in an array of colors, though some larger sets of dominoes have a more readable Arabic numeral pattern instead.

The domino effect is also relevant to writing fiction. If you’re a pantser, that is, you write your manuscript without using an outline or Scrivener to help you plot, you may find yourself with scenes that aren’t connected or don’t build tension or excitement. It’s as if the first domino isn’t placed at the right place or at the right time and it falls flat. This is a problem that can be solved by examining the scene dominoes to see how they connect and build the plot. Likewise, a minor issue can impact the whole story by tripping up the legal or social dominos that haven’t yet fallen.