Reinvented Dominoes Are More Addictive Than Candy Crush

The Grid, a set of wooden pieces resembling dominoes, is so gorgeous, you won't mind leaving it on the table.
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Estudio Victor Alemán

Mobile games are great for passing time while you're in line at the post office or enduring a long subway commute. They do not, however, make us more social.

It's easy to download a game and play it in your spare time, but in doing so, we forfeit the conversations that happen during a good card game, says Victor Alemán. An industrial designer in Mexico City, Alemán wants to reclaim the social dynamic of games, so he's invented his own—the Grid, a gorgeous set of wooden pieces resembling dominoes.

Alemán initially wanted to make a sumptuous set of dominoes—those already exist—but then decided to craft a game that was slightly more involved. In dominoes, players match tiles to other tiles with the same number of dots (pips, in domino-speak). You can only play off each tile once, because they're rectangles. In the Grid, you can play off each tile twice. The wooden chips are hexagons, each with three colors of ash, maple, and oak. To play, put down a chip and match one side to another chip's side of the same shade.

That's all fun, but when Alemán and his design partners tested out an early prototype, they realized the game was too easy. So they added black ebony to the list of wood used. The black section of any chip functions like a trump card: Set it down, and you’ve blocked off that path for other players. You win by getting rid of your chips first.

Early on, Alemán realized that a hurdle to playing board games is having to take them out of the box, so he made the pieces beautiful enough to be left out on a table, and at $400 a set, you'll want to show them off. Once you start a game, the Grid plays another trick on you: The three sides of each piece are angled slightly downward, making it tough to discern the wooden hues without getting up and moving away from your phone.