Domino is a type of game where players use dominoes, tiles or bones to play various games. The most common type of domino games are blocking and scoring. In a blocking game, the objective is to block the opponent from playing their next domino by attaching it to the end of the last one played. The other goal of a scoring game is to connect a domino from your hand with an end tile already in play to make a divisible sum of five or three.
Dominoes are rectangular pieces with a line down the middle that separates their ends into two squares. Each end is either blank or has a number of spots, called pips. The pips on a domino can be used to identify the domino’s number. The pips on each domino are marked with a number of numbers from one to six. The largest domino sets include 190 pieces and are called “double 18” sets.
In the early 18th century, dominoes appeared in Italy and quickly spread to Austria, southern Germany and France, where it remained a popular pastime until the 1860s. The game’s name, domino, is thought to come from the French word domino, which originally referred to a cape worn by a priest at masquerades or carnivals.
The game is also known as pupai in Chinese, which means “the falling one.” In the mid-18th century, a player would set up a row of dominoes on a table and attempt to knock them down.
There are many different rules for dominoes, and each of them can be very complex. But the key is to understand the basic physics of how they work.
First, the dominoes have inertia, a tendency to resist motion when there is no outside force pushing or pulling them. They have very high centers of gravity, so they rest on a very small surface area.
As a domino falls, it slips against the other dominoes in its row and creates friction. This causes some of the energy stored in each domino to be converted into heat or sound as it strikes the floor below it.
But it doesn’t take much for the domino to tip forward before gravity takes over and pulls it down. In fact, it only takes a tiny nudge to push the first domino past its tipping point and begin a cascade of new behaviors that leads to huge outcomes.
The nudge may be as simple as a smile or an appreciative nod from a friend. But that tiny act can spark a chain reaction of new behaviors, and often a shift in personal beliefs as well.
To get the domino effect to start, try to be as patient as possible when you are experimenting with new habits. It’s easy to lose momentum when you start trying to change too many things at once, so it’s best to break them down into smaller chunks and focus on progress rather than results.