The domino effect is a concept from business that describes how one event can influence other events, both good and bad. For example, if a company hires a new manager, that person can have an impact on the rest of the employees, either positively or negatively. The same is true if a celebrity makes a controversial political statement that sets off a chain reaction that can be hard to stop.

The term domino also refers to a game of small oblong blocks, usually black and white, that are used as gaming pieces in various ways. The individual dominoes are sometimes called bones, pieces, men, tiles, or tickets and can be played by one player against another, or many players in turn, with the goal of creating a line or pattern of dominoes. Some games use the whole set of dominoes, while others only require a few of them. A domino can be made of wood, bone, or even plastic.

In its earliest sense, domino was an earlier name for a long, hooded cloak worn with a mask at carnival season or at masquerades. It may have been derived from French dominus ‘lord, master’. Later, it came to mean a long hooded cape for the upper part of the head, a kind of domino. In the late 19th century, it became the name for a ‘domino pizza’ restaurant chain founded in Detroit, Michigan by Tom Monaghan, who had acquired James DeVarti’s half of Domino’s, Inc., in 1962.

Domino’s marketing strategy has been to make the company as cool and hip as its pizza. That’s why they’ve teamed up with crowd-sourced auto designers to create a colorful, cool-looking, and customized delivery car called the DXP (a recent article described it as “the cheese lover’s Batmobile”). Domino’s is also experimenting with drone delivery, so you can have your pizza delivered to your door by robot.

A typical domino set contains 28 unique dominoes, one for each possible combination of ends bearing zero to six dots (called pips). Each end must be touching another, and the total number of dots on exposed ends must match (a single-ended domino must touch a double-ended domino). Some of the most popular games are played with a double-six set.

The most basic domino variant involves scoring points by laying dominoes end to end, with the matching ends facing each other. Each time a domino is laid, the points on both sides are counted. In the most common game for two players, each player begins by drawing seven tiles from a stack of dominoes that is shuffled and form a stock or boneyard, from which they must draw when playing a new piece.

Most Western domino sets have 28 different dominoes, and each has its own rules for playing. There are, however, other types of dominoes that contain more or less than the standard 28. Chinese dominoes, for example, are typically longer and have different rules, such as requiring the players to match pips on their pieces.