Many children enjoy playing with dominoes – the little black and white rectangles that are stacked on end in long lines and then tipped over, one after the other. The physics of this chain reaction is fascinating, and it’s helped give rise to the term “the domino effect,” used to describe situations where one event has much larger-than-expected consequences for other events.

Lily Hevesh was 9 years old when she began collecting and building dominoes, and by the time she was 14, her set had grown to hundreds of thousands of pieces. She now creates mind-blowing domino installations, and has amassed more than 2 million YouTube subscribers watching her creations come to life. When she starts a new project, Hevesh begins by considering the theme or purpose of the installation and brainstorming images or words that might be useful for the design.

The dominoes in a set, also known as bones, cards, men or tiles, are normally twice as wide as they are tall. Each has an identity-bearing side, called an end, and a blank or identically patterned side. The dominoes’ identifying marks, or pips, are typically an arrangement of dots similar to those on a die; some of the pips are colored (black, white, or both) while others are bare, or “blank.” A set may be made of any number of different materials. Sets that are made of natural materials such as bone, silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (mother-of-pearl), ivory or a dark hardwood such as ebony, have a more elegant look and feel.

Dominoes are most commonly used to play positional games. The players take turns placing a domino edge-to-edge against another in such a way that the adjacent sides match, either by identical values or by forming some specified total value. Dominoes can also be used to play solitaire and trick-taking games that were once popular in certain places to circumvent religious prohibitions against the use of cards.

Dominoes can be arranged in many ways, including a simple straight or curved line. They can be stacked in a circle, into a spiral, or into other shapes. In addition to being fun for kids and adults, the pieces can be used to make artistic designs. In fact, professional domino artists compete to build the most impressive domino effect or reaction in front of an audience. Some of these designs are truly astonishing, and they can take a few nail-biting minutes for the entire installation to fall.