A domino is a tile with a pattern of spots, or pips, on one side and a blank or smooth surface on the other. Often, the pips are colored with a combination of black and white, reflecting the domino’s early history as a long hooded cloak worn together with a mask at carnival or masquerade events. Today, a domino is typically a gaming piece in a set of playing pieces that also include aces, twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes, sevens and eights. Dominoes are used for a variety of games that involve blocking opponents’ play, scoring points or learning to recognize numbers and counting.
The earliest domino sets were designed to represent the 21 results of throwing two dice, each with six sides. Later, dominoes with blank faces began to appear. Currently, dominoes come in a wide variety of colors, shapes and sizes, including circular and shaped pieces. The most common type is the double-six, with each end a matching set of two pips. The game is played by laying tiles in careful sequence, each touching the ends of the adjacent tiles so that the pips match. The first player to complete his or her hand wins.
Dominoes are normally twice as long as they are wide, allowing players to easily re-stack the pieces for reuse. The pips on each domino have values from six to zero, or blank, which makes the tile lighter or heavier depending on its number of pips. The size and weight of the tiles determine the domino’s rank or score.
Each domino is also characterized by its type, which is determined by its position in the set and the way in which it matches other dominoes. Some types of domino are grouped together by color, while others are arranged in sets with different values to form the game’s base and the game’s layout.
Hevesh has built a career by creating spectacular domino setups for TV shows, movies and musical artists. Some of her largest installations take several nail-biting minutes for the dominoes to fall according to the laws of physics. When she begins designing a new project, Hevesh follows an engineering-design process that she says helps her organize and focus her thoughts.
In the early stages of her career, Hevesh focused on speed and efficiency. Over time, she has implemented various strategic moves that have aligned with the critical components of her business model, such as timely delivery and HR practices.
Whether you are a pantser who writes off the cuff without a detailed outline or a plotter who uses software such as Scrivener to help plan and weed out scenes that don’t rise to the level of the scene before them, plotting your novel will always come down to answering the question: What happens next? Considering the effects of the domino will help you create a story that will hold readers’ interest.
