Dominoes are small blocks of wood or other material with a number of pips printed on them. The pips are arranged in a circle or other pattern, often with white on one side and black on the other. The pips are sometimes painted or inlaid, but they are more often printed on. Dominoes can be made from wood, bone or even ivory. In the past, they were also made from metals such as brass and pewter and from ceramic clay. Nowadays, they are usually crafted from heavy plastic. Some of the more elaborate dominoes are designed to be 3-D and can include curved lines, grids that form pictures when they fall, or stacked walls.
Dominos can be used for games such as domino bridge or piquet, in which players try to make chains of adjacent dominoes with matching pips. They can also be used to form patterns, such as a row of dots in a square or rectangle. In most domino games, the winner is determined by scoring points. These are awarded to a player who lays down a tile end to end such that its pips match those of an opposing tile. The number of points scored depends on the type of game being played, and may be determined in advance (e.g., 100 or 200 points) or determined by the outcome of a given number of rounds. The player who scores the most points in a certain number of rounds wins.
If a player does not have a matching tile, they must draw a new one from their hand and place it on the table so that its pips touch those of the previous tile. They can then play another tile in the same way, and so on. This process continues until all of the player’s tiles have been played and the chain is complete. The player who is left without a tile to lay will be out of the game.
The game of domino was first recorded in Italy and France around the mid-18th century, but the earliest documented use of the term may have been a reference to a type of tile that was used to mark gravestones in medieval Europe. In its modern form, the game is most popular in the United States and Canada.
The popularity of the game has led to the development of many different types of dominoes and sets, as well as rules for playing them. Some are based on mathematical operations, others on chance, and still others are simply a matter of aesthetic taste. Regardless of the rules, though, most games involve some sort of a chain reaction that leads to the final result. In some cases, this is a simple matter of a single domino falling over to start the entire process all over again. This idea is also relevant to novel writing, where a single scene can be compared to a domino that causes a series of events to unfold in sequence.