Domino is a generic term for a game in which players place dominoes edge to edge against one another to form either a line or some specified total. The first to complete the required number of points wins. Western dominoes have been around since the late 1700s, having been introduced to England by French prisoners of war at that time. In addition to the classic blocking and scoring games, dominoes can also be used for solitaire or trick-taking games that were once popular in some places to circumvent religious proscriptions against playing cards. The word “domino” itself has several etymological roots. Before it was a generic game, the term was often used to describe a long hooded cloak worn together with a mask in carnival season or at a masquerade.
The pieces that make up a domino set are called Dominoes, though they are also known by other names including bones, cards, men, tiles, spinners, or tickets. Dominoes are usually twice as wide as they are tall and feature a line in the middle to divide them visually into two squares, with each side bearing an arrangement of spots, or pips, indicating its identity. Each side of a domino is assigned a different rank or weight, depending on the number of pips it has.
Physicist Lorne Whitehead has demonstrated that a single domino can knock over objects one-and-a-half times its own size. Hevesh uses this principle to create her mind-blowing domino setups. When she nudges the first domino, much of its potential energy converts to kinetic energy, which gives it the push to overtake and knock over the next domino, and so on—until all the dominoes are down.
When a Domino’s customer orders pizza online, the company delivers the food to the doorstep within 30 minutes or less. The company’s founder, Domino’s Pizza CEO David Brandon Monaghan, knew that in order to keep this promise, the company had to invest heavily in delivery vehicles, which would get the pizzas to customers faster.
This led to the Domino’s Pizza Box, a special vehicle designed specifically for delivery. It’s not the only innovative delivery method for Domino’s, which is currently experimenting with drones and robots. However, the company’s most important innovation may be its focus on location. Domino’s puts its stores close to college campuses, where they can serve young people who want fast pizza when they’re hungry.
When writing a novel, I often compare scenes to dominoes by laying them out on a table and looking at how they fit together. If a scene in your novel does not fit with the previous scenes or with the emotional shifts indicated by earlier scenes, you can try to rearrange the dominoes until they do. You might have to take a few steps back, but the end result should be a story that flows logically from one scene to the next.