A domino is a flat, thumb-sized rectangular block with one side blank or identically patterned and the other with an arrangement of dots or spots (called pips) ranging from six to none. Twenty-eight such pieces make a full set of dominoes. A domino is used for playing positional games in which players place a tile edge to edge against another, usually the same color, so that their adjacent faces match and/or form some specified total.
Dominoes are also the building blocks of many mechanical devices, such as Rube Goldberg machines. They are sometimes used as props in movies, theater and musical productions, and they are often toppled for entertainment at public events, including the 2009 Berlin anniversary commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Hevesh is a domino artist who creates mind-blowing setups for film, television and events. Her YouTube channel, Hevesh5, has more than 2 million subscribers. She’s worked on team projects involving up to 300,000 dominoes and helped set the Guinness World Record for the most dominoes in a circular arrangement: 76,017. Her largest installations can take several nail-biting minutes to fall.
When she first began collecting dominoes, Hevesh was a girl of about 10. By 14, she had started posting videos of her work online and quickly gained a following. Now, at 20, she’s a professional domino artist who travels the world creating spectacular setups for movie sets, TV shows and events, such as a Katy Perry album launch.
She follows a version of the engineering-design process when she develops her setups. She considers the theme or purpose of the installation, brainstorms ideas, and then starts working out the details. For example, she’ll figure out how many dominoes she’ll need, which pieces will be the most visually striking and how they will be arranged on the table.
Once the foundation of a domino rally is in place, the dominoes are placed and play begins. Each player draws seven tiles from a double-six set, the remainder being discarded. When a player can’t play, they “chip out.” When all tiles are chipped out and a new line is being played, the winning partners are those whose combined sum of all pips on their remaining tiles is the lowest.
As each domino is pushed over, it transmits energy to the next domino on its row and then to all of the other dominoes that are in its path, which ultimately causes them to topple. This chain reaction is called the domino effect, and it’s what makes an impressive display of dominoes so exciting to watch. However, while Domino’s rallies are often dazzling to behold, they can be dangerous. If a domino is knocked off its row, it can fall on people standing or walking nearby, causing injuries and even fatalities. This is why it’s important to practice safe domino rallies and always be aware of your surroundings when playing this popular game.