Domino is a tile-shaped game piece with one or more squares on each face that are either blank or marked with dots resembling those on dice. It is normally twice as long as it is wide, but it may vary in size. Dominoes are used in games of chance or skill to build lines of matching tiles, scoring points or achieving specific goals, such as forming certain totals or creating specific patterns. Some domino games use the traditional blocking and scoring techniques while others are adaptations of card games or other types of strategy-based games.

Some of the most popular domino games involve building lines of matching tiles, scoring points or forming particular patterns or totals. Some are played with a single domino, while others have many dominoes per player and are more complex than the standard blocking or scoring games. Dominoes are also often used to circumvent religious prohibitions against playing cards.

There are hundreds of different domino games. While they may differ slightly from one to the next, most of them have similar basic rules. Once the rules are understood, the games are easy to learn and can be enjoyed by people of all ages and experience levels.

The word domino originally referred to a hooded robe worn with an eye mask at a masquerade or carnival, but it has since come to mean any type of game using a set of these small blocks. The word has also been used to describe a series of events or a pattern, such as the fall of a domino, or the effect of a domino on a country’s political situation, as in the phrase, “Domino theory” (or “Domino effect”).

After the pieces are shuffled and the stock is set up, each player draws a domino from the stock and plays it according to game rules. The first player to play all of their dominoes makes the first move in the game. If the players have equal numbers of doubles, the player with the heaviest double is allowed to make the first move.

Dominoes are often made from materials such as bone, silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (mother of pearl) or ivory, with a black or ebony pips inlaid or painted on them. More recently, sets have been made from a variety of other natural materials including stone (e.g., marble, granite or soapstone), other woods, metals and ceramic clay.

Dominoes have inertia, meaning that they resist motion until a force pushes them over. When that first domino falls, it starts a chain reaction that travels down the line and eventually leads to a domino that pushes on the next, and so on. The energy that is released as the pieces fall can be thought of as a “domino pulse” or an analogy to the firing of a neuron in the brain. Each new domino adds to the pulse’s intensity, and the resulting energy is released as the neuron fires.