Domino is a game in which the objective is to form chains of domino pieces that touch one another. The number of pips on each domino is called its value, and the higher the value, the more points the player receives for his chain. Some players also refer to the number of pips as the rank or weight of a domino.
Dominos can be used to create straight lines, curved lines, grids that form pictures when they fall, stacked walls, and 3D structures like towers and pyramids. Domino artists use various colored and shaped dominoes to make these amazing designs, and some even go so far as to set up entire scenes for movie premieres and musical events. Hevesh, a YouTube star who goes by the name Hevesh5, has more than 2 million subscribers and has created massive domino setups for movies, TV shows, and celebrity events.
Some games of domino feature a stock from which a player draws the amount of tiles that he is permitted to take according to the rules of that game. These tiles are added to the number of tiles that he has already drawn, and any excess is returned to the stock before the next player draws. Some players may also choose to bye tiles from the stock, in which case those tiles are not drawn and do not affect the outcome of the game.
In a video posted by University of Toronto professor Stephen Morris, Hevesh sets 13 dominoes on top of each other, each one a millimeter tall and only 1 millimeter thick. The last domino topples at the end of a two-minute demonstration with nail-biting tension. Hevesh says the key is that each domino has a high center of gravity and only needs to be slightly tipped forward for it to fall into place.
Hevesh’s domino art is impressive, but it’s not as difficult to do as you might think. She uses a special template to mark where the dominoes should be placed on the table, and then she draws a design with arrows showing how each piece would fall. She says she sometimes uses up to 50 markers for a single layout, and that the biggest display she has created consists of 300,000 dominoes.
As a writer, Hevesh’s domino image can remind us that sometimes our stories need a little bit of help to get on the right track. If we aren’t careful, our writing can become a bunch of scenes that don’t connect or have enough logical impact. We might even lose sight of our goal, just as dominoes can lose their way when they are stacked up in an intricate arrangement.
To avoid this, Hevesh recommends that we take the time to create a clear blueprint for our story and then carefully follow it as we write it. This will ensure that our scenes have a logical progression, and we can keep our eye on the prize—a polished and captivating story.