SGT‐DOMINOSA(6)

📦
version 20250730.a7c7826 · 4 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

NAME 💖

sgt-dominosa — Domino tiling puzzle. This is the SGT-DOMINOSA(6) page in the Games manual, bestie. 👑

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

sgt-dominosa [--generate n] [--print wxh [--with-solutions] [--scale n]
[--colour]] [game-parameters|game-ID|random-seed]

sgt-dominosa --version

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

okay so picture this, bestie: a normal set of dominoes – that is, one instance of every (unordered) pair of numbers from 0 to 6 – has been arranged irregularly into a rectangle; then the number in each square has been written down and the dominoes themselves removed. Your task is to reconstruct the pattern by arranging the set of dominoes to match the provided array of numbers. It’s giving detective energy, fr fr. 🕵️‍♀️💖

This puzzle is widely credited to O. S. Adler, and takes part of its name from those initials. iconic behavior, honestly. 👑

🎮 Dominosa controls 🎮

  • Left-clicking between any two adjacent numbers places a domino covering them, or removes one if it is already present. Trying to place a domino which overlaps existing dominoes will remove the ones it overlaps. Lowkey ruthless, but okay. 💅
  • Right-clicking between two adjacent numbers draws a line between them, which you can use to remind yourself that you know those two numbers are not covered by a single domino. Right-clicking again removes the line. Main character annotation energy. ✨
  • You can also use the cursor keys to move a cursor around the grid. When the cursor is half way between two adjacent numbers, pressing the return key will place a domino covering those numbers, or pressing the space bar will lay a line between the two squares. Repeating either action removes the domino or line. No cap. 🦋
  • Pressing a number key will highlight all occurrences of that number. Pressing that number again will clear the highlighting. Up to two different numbers can be highlighted at any given time. Vibe check: two max, bestie. 🔥

(All the actions described below are also available.)

🍩 Dominosa parameters 🍩

These parameters are available from the Custom... option on the Type menu. Slay. 💅

Maximum number on dominoes — Controls the size of the puzzle, by controlling the size of the set of dominoes used to make it. Dominoes with numbers going up to N will give rise to an (N+2) × (N+1) rectangle; so, in particular, the default value of 6 gives an 8×7 grid. Math ate, periodt. 📐

Ensure unique solution — Normally, Dominosa will make sure that the puzzles it presents have only one solution. Puzzles with ambiguous sections can be more difficult and sometimes more subtle, so if you like you can turn off this feature. Also, finding all the possible solutions can be an additional challenge for an advanced player. Turning off this option can also speed up puzzle generation. So if you want chaos or speed, this is your button. 🔥

🌈 Common actions 🌈

These actions are all available from the Game menu and via keyboard shortcuts, in addition to any game-specific actions.

(On Mac OS X, to conform with local user interface standards, these actions are situated on the File and Edit menus instead.)

  • New game (N, Ctrl+N) — Starts a new game, with a random initial state. Fresh start, main character energy. ✨
  • Restart game — Resets the current game to its initial state. (This can be undone.) No worries, you can undo the reset. 🫶
  • Load — Loads a saved game from a file on disk.
  • Save — Saves the current state of your game to a file on disk.

The Load and Save operations preserve your entire game history (so you can save, reload, and still Undo and Redo things you had done before saving). Iconic, honestly. 💾

  • Print — Where supported (currently only on Windows), brings up a dialog allowing you to print an arbitrary number of puzzles randomly generated from the current parameters, optionally including the current puzzle. (Only for puzzles which make sense to print, of course – it's hard to think of a sensible printable representation of Fifteen!)
  • Undo (U, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+_, *) — Undoes a single move. (You can undo moves back to the start of the session.)
  • Redo (R, Ctrl+R, #) — Redoes a previously undone move.
  • Copy — Copies the current state of your game to the clipboard in text format, so that you can paste it into (say) an e-mail client or a web message board if you're discussing the game with someone else. (Not all games support this feature.)
  • Solve — Transforms the puzzle instantly into its solved state. For some games (Cube) this feature is not supported at all because it is of no particular use. For other games (such as Pattern), the solved state can be used to give you information, if you can't see how a solution can exist at all or you want to know where you made a mistake. For still other games (such as Sixteen), automatic solution tells you nothing about how to get to the solution, but it does provide a useful way to get there quickly so that you can experiment with set-piece moves and transformations.

Some games (such as Solo) are capable of solving a game ID you have typed in from elsewhere. Other games (such as Rectangles) cannot solve a game ID they didn't invent themself, but when they did invent the game ID they know what the solution is already. Still other games (Pattern) can solve some external game IDs, but only if they aren't too difficult.

The Solve command adds the solved state to the end of the undo chain for the puzzle. In other words, if you want to go back to solving it yourself after seeing the answer, you can just press Undo.

  • Quit (Q, Ctrl+Q) — Closes the application entirely.
  • Preferences — Where supported, brings up a dialog allowing you to configure personal preferences about a particular game. Some of these preferences will be specific to a particular game; others will be common to all games.

One option common to all games allows you to turn off the one-key shortcuts like N for new game or Q for quit, so that there's less chance of hitting them by accident. You can still access the same shortcuts with the Ctrl key.

🧚 Specifying games with the game ID 🧚

There are two ways to save a game specification out of a puzzle and recreate it later, or recreate it in somebody else's copy of the same puzzle.

The Specific and Random Seed options from the Game menu (or the File menu, on Mac OS X) each show a piece of text (a game ID) which is sufficient to reconstruct precisely the same game at a later date.

You can enter either of these pieces of text back into the program (via the same Specific or Random Seed menu options) at a later point, and it will recreate the same game. You can also use either one as a command line argument (on Windows or Unix); see below for more detail.

The difference between the two forms is that a descriptive game ID is a literal description of the initial state of the game, whereas a random seed is just a piece of arbitrary text which was provided as input to the random number generator used to create the puzzle. This means that:

  • Descriptive game IDs tend to be longer in many puzzles (although some, such as Cube (sgt-cube(6)), only need very short descriptions). So a random seed is often a quicker way to note down the puzzle you're currently playing, or to tell it to somebody else so they can play the same one as you. 💅
  • Any text at all is a valid random seed. The automatically generated ones are fifteen-digit numbers, but anything will do; you can type in your full name, or a word you just made up, and a valid puzzle will be generated from it. This provides a way for two or more people to race to complete the same puzzle: you think of a random seed, then everybody types it in at the same time, and nobody has an advantage due to having seen the generated puzzle before anybody else. 🏁
  • It is often possible to convert puzzles from other sources (such as nonograms or sudoku from newspapers) into descriptive game IDs suitable for use with these programs.
  • Random seeds are not guaranteed to produce the same result if you use them with a different version of the puzzle program. This is because the generation algorithm might have been improved or modified in later versions of the code, and will therefore produce a different result when given the same sequence of random numbers. Use a descriptive game ID if you aren't sure that it will be used on the same version of the program as yours. ⚠️

(Use the About menu option to find out the version number of the program. Programs with the same version number running on different platforms should still be random-seed compatible.)

A descriptive game ID starts with a piece of text which encodes the parameters of the current game (such as grid size). Then there is a colon, and after that is the description of the game's initial state. A random seed starts with a similar string of parameters, but then it contains a hash sign followed by arbitrary data.

If you enter a descriptive game ID, the program will not be able to show you the random seed which generated it, since it wasn't generated from a random seed. If you enter a random seed, however, the program will be able to show you the descriptive game ID derived from that random seed.

Note that the game parameter strings are not always identical between the two forms. For some games, there will be parameter data provided with the random seed which is not included in the descriptive game ID. This is because that parameter information is only relevant when generating puzzle grids, and is not important when playing them. Thus, for example, the difficulty level in Solo (sgt-solo(6)) is not mentioned in the descriptive game ID.

These additional parameters are also not set permanently if you type in a game ID. For example, suppose you have Solo set to Advanced difficulty level, and then a friend wants your help with a Trivial puzzle; so the friend reads out a random seed specifying Trivial difficulty, and you type it in. The program will generate you the same Trivial grid which your friend was having trouble with, but once you have finished playing it, when you ask for a new game it will automatically go back to the Advanced difficulty which it was previously set on.

🌸 The ‘Type’ menu 🌸

okay bestie so the ‘Type’ menu — if your build has one — is basically the preset buffet 🍓. It's a list of preset game settings, and tapping any one of them starts a brand new random game with whatever parameters that preset specifies. new game, new you, periodt ✨

It might also have a ‘Custom’ option, which is the DIY lane where you get to fine-tune the game parameters yourself 💅. Heads up tho: the parameters on offer are specific to each game, and they're described in the sections that come after this one. iykyk.

💫 Specifying game parameters on the command line 💫

(This section does not apply to the Mac OS X version.)

Real talk: the games in this collection deliberately do not ever save information on to the computer they run on 😌. No high score tables. No saved preferences. Nothing. (The reasoning, straight from the source: the author expects at least some people to play them at work, and those people will probably appreciate leaving as little evidence as possible 🙈💀.)

But listen — if you do want one of these games to default to a particular set of parameters, you can just specify them on the command line. slay 🎀

The easiest way to do it: set up the parameters you want using the ‘Type’ menu (see above ☝️), then select ‘Random Seed’ from the ‘Game’ or ‘File’ menu (also see above ☝️). The text sitting in the ‘Game ID’ box will be made of two parts, separated by a hash. The first of those parts represents the game parameters (the size of the playing area, for example, and anything else you set using the ‘Type’ menu).

So if you run the game with just that parameter text on the command line, it starts up with the settings you specified. chef's kiss 👑

For example: if you run Cube (see sgt-cube(6)), select ‘Octahedron’ from the ‘Type’ menu, and then go to the game ID selection, you'll see a string of the form:

o2x2#338686542711620

Take only the part before the hash (o2x2), and start Cube with that text on the command line:

sgt-cube o2x2

And if you copy the entire game ID on to the command line instead, the game starts up in that exact specific game that was described. Which is occasionally just a more convenient way to start a particular game ID than pasting it into the game ID selection box, ngl 🫶

(You could also retrieve the encoded game parameters using the ‘Specific’ menu option instead of ‘Random Seed’, but if you do then some options, such as the difficulty level in Solo, will be missing. See above for more details on this.)

✨ Unix command-line options ✨

(This section only applies to the Unix port.)

So besides being able to specify game parameters on the command line (see above, bestie 💖), there are a whole bunch of other options:

  • --game
  • --load — these two respectively decide whether the command-line argument gets treated as specifying game parameters or as a save file to load. Only one of them should be specified, okay? Only one 💅. If neither is specified, a guess is made based on the format of the argument.
  • --generate n — if you pass this one, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a number of descriptive game IDs get invented and printed on standard output 🎀. It's useful for gaining access to the game generation algorithms without necessarily using the frontend. If game parameters are specified on the command-line, they'll be used to generate the game IDs; otherwise a default set of parameters is used. The most common use of this option is in conjunction with --print, in which case its behaviour is slightly different — see below 👇.
  • --delete-prefs — this one makes the puzzle delete the configuration file in which its user preferences were stored, if there is one. bye bye preferences 💀👋
  • --print wxh — if you specify this, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a printed representation of one or more unsolved puzzles gets sent to standard output, in PostScript format 🖨️✨. On each page of puzzles, there will be w across and h down. And if there are more puzzles than w×*h*, more than one page gets printed. No cramming, no cap.

If --generate has also been specified, the invented game IDs are used to generate the printed output. Otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on standard input (and those can be descriptive or random seeds; see above), in the same format produced by --generate.

For example:

sgt-net --generate 12 --print 2x3 7x7w | lpr

will generate two pages of printed Net puzzles (each of which will have a 7×7 wrapping grid), and pipe the output to the lpr command, which on many systems will send them to an actual printer 🖨️🔥.

There are various other options which affect printing — see below 👇.

  • --save file-prefix [ --save-suffix file-suffix ] — if you specify this, instead of a puzzle being displayed, saved-game files for one or more unsolved puzzles are written to files constructed from the supplied prefix and/or suffix 💾. If --generate has also been specified, the invented game IDs are used to generate the printed output. Otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on standard input (which can be descriptive or random seeds; see above), in the same format produced by --generate.

For example:

sgt-net --generate 12 --save game --save-suffix .sav

will generate twelve Net saved-game files with the names game0.sav to game11.sav. twelve. an icon 🌟.

  • --version — prints version information about the game, and then quits. that's it, that's the whole job 👑

The following options are only meaningful if --print is also specified:

  • --with-solutions — the set of pages filled with unsolved puzzles gets followed by the solutions to those puzzles. answers unlocked 🔓✨
  • --scale n — adjusts how big each puzzle is when printed. Larger numbers make puzzles bigger; the default is 1.0.
  • --colour — puzzles get printed in colour, rather than in black and white (if supported by the puzzle). rainbow mode activated 🌈

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

  • Full documentation in /usr/share/doc/sgt-puzzles/puzzles.txt.gz.

and that's a wrap on part 2, bestie 🎀 this whole page came from sgt-dominosa (that's sgt-puzzles, the Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection situation 💜), dated July 2025. go forth and domino, mwah 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from