Dominoes, cousins of playing cards, are one of the most versatile tools for game play. From professional dominoes competition to merely setting up and knocking over an array of them, these little flat blocks offer a lot of fun and challenge. And as Hevesh, a professional domino artist who builds mind-blowing sets for her YouTube channel, points out, it doesn’t take much to set the whole thing in motion: “All it takes is a tiny nudge.”
The first step to building any domino setup starts with considering what you want to accomplish and brainstorming images that can make that happen. From there, Hevesh starts to draw out a blueprint, which she explains is the process of “converting an idea into a physical structure.”
Hevesh’s plans aren’t simply drawings—they’re engineering projects. They involve a lot of math and careful measurement, and they must be carefully executed. This is because dominoes, like all objects with a high center of gravity, must be properly balanced to stay upright. A domino is only stable if it rests on a small surface area, and the more of them are stacked together, the more weight they must have to balance out their mass.
Once Hevesh gets her blueprint in place, she starts to plan out what each domino will do. Each domino has a front and a back, and the back is either blank or decorated with a design. The front, however, is what’s important, and it contains markings that are commonly called pips. There are seven pips in the typical European domino, which differ from those of Chinese dominoes. The former include the results of throwing two six-sided dice, while the latter incorporate duplicates and separate the military and civil suits.
After calculating the number of dots on each domino, Hevesh draws out a diagram that shows how to build up an arrangement that will eventually knock over all the pieces. She uses straight lines, curved lines, grids that form pictures when they fall, stacked walls, and even 3D structures such as towers and pyramids.
A typical domino has a maximum of seven pips on each end, but extended sets increase the number by adding more ends with more pips. The most common extensions are double-nine (55 tiles), double-12, and double-15. The largest possible domino, a double-nine with no repeats and three extra pips on each end, is almost impossible to construct.
Whether you plot your novel off the cuff or follow a detailed outline, every single scene in your book needs to lead up to a moment where something happens. And what’s more exciting than watching a domino effect? If you haven’t yet, give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.