Dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates in an array of double-well potentials realize an effective transverse Ising model with peculiar inter-layer interactions, that may result under proper conditions in an anomalous first-order ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic phase transition, and non-trivial phases due to frustration. The considered setup allows as well for the study of Kibble-Zurek defect formation, whose kink statistics follows that expected from the universality class of the mean-field one-dimensional transverse Ising model. Furthermore, random occupation of each layer of the stack leads to random effective Ising interactions and local transverse fields, that may lead to the Anderson-like localization of imbalance perturbations.