The Domino Effect

The great thing about holidays is the fact that you have so much excess spare time on your hands that you find room to dig through old family relics and heirlooms.
Every summer, I find myself headfirst in some dingy cupboard sorting through pictures and souvenirs of a time that seems so far back, it might not have happened.
Just yesterday, I produced a rather battered green-and-black-checkered box from my excavation site and found them to contain a pile of ancient dominoes.
I can remember the joy I used to be bursting with, meticulously aligning them in winding serpentine patterns and then watching the dominoes fall upon each other with such excellent timing that they resembled a rather dark, rippling wave.
But dominoes weren't all arrange-and-destroy toys. Turns out they have a long, winding, complex history and play like any old traditional past time.
So being the wonderful researcher I am, I devotedly, sat myself down in the swivelling chair and tapped in 'Wikipedia' on my Google Search.
Now everyone knows Wikipedia- the monster storehouse of information pertaining to every speck present on Earth.
So, there it was, all ready, digested and processed.
Here are excerpts from the website describing the two popular adaptations of playing dominoes.

Basic rules
Most domino games are blocking games, i.e. the objective is to empty one's hand whilst blocking the opponents. In the end, a score may be determined by counting the pips in the losing players' hands. In scoring games the scoring is different and happens mostly during game play, making it the principal objective.
Block game
The most basic domino variant is for two players and requires a double six set. The 28 tiles are shuffled face down and form the stock or bone yard. Each player draws seven tiles; the remainder is not used. One player begins by downing (playing the first tile) one of their tiles. This tile starts the line of play, a series of tiles in which adjacent tiles touch with matching, i.e. equal, values. The players alternately extend the line of play with one tile at one of its two ends. A player who cannot do this passes. The game ends when one player wins by playing their last tile, or when the game is blocked because neither player can play.
Draw game
In the more interesting Draw game, players are additionally allowed to draw as many tiles as desired from the stock before playing a tile, and they are not allowed to pass before the stock is (nearly) empty. The score of a game is the number of pips in the losing player's hand plus the number of pips in the stock. Most rules prescribe that two tiles need to remain in the stock.The Draw game is often referred to as simply "dominoes".
Adaptations of both games can accommodate more than two players, who may play individually or in teams.

There's much more to Dominoes then hit-and-run, eh?