Domino set a la Domino Rally (late 80s/early 90s)

pulykamell
Thu, 23 Mar 2023 16:38:39 +0000
Cafe Society

The other day I was thinking about that brief phase in the 80s or thereabouts of domino sets for toppling. One of them was Domino Rally (Wikipedia tells me it also went by the name Domino Express in Europe). When I was a kid, I had a different one though, and my searches have left me empty. I suppose it’s also possible that it’s a different set of Domino Rally (as they had a bunch of different ones), but I don’t think so.

The main distinguishing features of this set is that the dominos were quite small, to my memory – maybe 1 cm x 2 cm or 1.5 cm x 2.5 cm. Somewhere around that size. However, it also came with the setup device which consisted of a frame and various punched-out sheets of domino patterns. So there may be, say, a 100-200 domino spiral pattern, or a cascade pattern, or a back-and-forth run pattern with hairpin turns, or just a straight run, etc. You’d put down the frame and pattern to use, put the dominos through the holes (so there is no danger in one domino toppling over all your work, and then when you were done, there was a lever (I think) you’d push that would lift the pattern straight up, and you’d remove the frame and have your lovely spiral domino pattern set. (Or possibly you would just lift it straight up yourself if there wasn’t a lever, but I feel there was something that did the first bit for you.) You’d then connect to that pattern with a run, and you could connect various patterns together, etc.

Hope that’s clear enough. Anyone have any idea what I may be thinking of?

3 posts - 2 participants