You’ve probably seen videos of a long chain of dominoes falling one after another till the entire pile is wiped clean. They’re gratifying to watch, and often the domino artist has carefully placed each piece so that when it falls it will set off a series of subsequent events that lead to a final result such as a portrait or giant artwork. But just how do these mind-blowing domino displays come to be?

The history of domino dates back to the early 12th or 13th century in China. There, domino was used to play games of strategy similar to ludo, and it was later introduced to Japan in the early 18th century. The modern version of the domino is a small rectangular wood or plastic block with either a blank face or one marked with dots resembling those on dice. The most common domino sets contain 28 tiles, and larger sets are possible by adding more rows of pips on the ends of the tiles.

Domino has many uses in modern life, from teaching kids numbers and counting to facilitating discussions about philosophy and ethics. It’s also a popular choice for birthday and wedding gifts, and the ability to personalize dominoes by adding custom text or images makes them even more valuable.

Whether you’re playing with your children, friends, or fellow students, domino is an excellent way to spend time together and bond with family and colleagues. There are numerous domino games, from simple to complex, that allow players of different ages and skill levels to compete or cooperate. The most popular are positional games, in which players place a domino edge to edge against another, so that the adjacent faces match (e.g., 5 to 5, or 2 to 2). Scoring games, such as bergen and muggins, determine points by counting the number of pips in each losing player’s hand. Other play formats include blocking games such as matador, chicken foot, and Mexican train.

In fiction writing, the concept of a domino effect can help you create a story with natural flow and momentum. Each scene should advance a point or provide information that influences the next scene. Using this concept as a guide, you can weed out scenes that seem to be at the wrong angle or don’t have enough logical impact on the scene ahead of them.

When you flip over a domino, most of its potential energy converts to kinetic energy, the energy of motion. Then some of that energy is transmitted to the next domino, providing the push needed to knock it over. This process continues, transferring energy from domino to domino, until all the pieces fall. You can see this in action by constructing a simple domino setup and watching the resulting chain reaction. It’s also an effective model of the way nerve impulses travel along neurons in your body. A triggering signal at the body end of a neuron can cause a domino effect in the cell body and axons, which carry the signal along to the rest of the brain.