SGT‐FLIP(6)

📦

version 20250730.a7c7826 · 4 versions

20250730.a7c7826 · ubuntu stonking (latest)
20191231.79a5378 · ubuntu jammy
20230122.806ae71 · debian bookworm
20230410.71cf891 · debian trixie, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute

🌸 NAME 🌸

okay so you just opened SGT‐FLIP(6) — that's the games-section manual page for sgt-flip — and ngl bestie you're about to have the cutest little brain workout. 💅

sgt-flip — Tile inversion puzzle 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

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

sgt-flip --version

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So picture this: you've got a grid of squares, some of them light and some of them dark. Your whole entire mission — your main character goal — is to get every single square lit up at the same time. ✨

And yeah, sure, you can pick any square you want and flip it from light to dark or dark to light. But bestie. But. When you flip one square, the other squares around it flip too. 😭 That's the whole twist. That's the plot.

Every square has a little diagram inside it showing you exactly which other squares are gonna get dragged into the flip when you click it. iykyk. 🦋

🎮 Flip controls 🎮

You can play this one with either the keyboard or the mouse, whatever your vibe is.

Left-click in a square to flip it and all its associated squares. Or, if you're a keyboard girlie, use the cursor keys to pick your square and hit Space or Enter to flip. 🫶

If you use the ‘Solve’ function on this game, it's gonna mark some of the squares in red. Click once in every square with a red mark and boom — the game should be solved. ✨ (And lowkey if you click a square that does not have a red mark? A red mark will appear in it, to let you know you're gonna need to reverse that operation to actually reach the solution. 💀)

(All the actions described below are also available. We got you. 💖)

🧩 Flip parameters 🧩

You can find these cuties under the ‘Custom...’ option in the ‘Type’ menu.

Width, Height — the size of the grid, in squares. 📐
Shape type — this control decides the shape of the region that gets flipped when you click any given square. The default setting, ‘Crosses’, makes every square flip itself plus its four immediate neighbours (or three or two of them, if it's sitting on an edge or in a corner, bless). The other setting, ‘Random’, picks a random shape for every single square — so the game is different every time you play. chaos, but make it cute. 🌈

🕹️ Common actions 🕹️

These actions are all available from the ‘Game’ menu and via keyboard shortcuts, on top of whatever game-specific actions exist.

(On Mac OS X, to conform with local user interface standards, these actions are situated on the ‘File’ and ‘Edit’ menus instead. different menu, same energy. 🍓)

New game (N, Ctrl+N) — starts a new game, with a random initial state. fresh start, new you. ✨
Restart game — resets the current game back to its initial state. (And yes, this can be undone. we love a reversible decision. 🫶)
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 the things you did before you saved. the timeline stays intact bestie. 👑
Print — where supported (currently only on Windows), brings up a dialog letting you 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 all the way back to the start of the session. no consequences era. 💅)
Redo (R, Ctrl+R, #) — redoes a move you previously undid. 🔁
Copy — copies the current state of your game to the clipboard in text format, so 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, so don't come for me. 🙈)
Solve — transforms the puzzle instantly into its solved state. for some games (Cube) this feature isn't supported at all, because it's of no particular use. for other games (such as Pattern), the solved state can hand you information — handy if you can't see how a solution could exist at all, or you just want to know where you made a mistake. and for still other games (such as Sixteen), automatic solution tells you nothing about how to get to the solution, but it does give you a useful way to get there quickly so you can experiment with set-piece moves and transformations. slay, honestly. 🔥
- Some games (such as Solo) are capable of solving a game ID you typed in from elsewhere. Other games (such as Rectangles) can't solve a game ID they didn't invent themself — but when they did invent the game ID, they already know what the solution is. 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 peeking at the answer, you can just press Undo. no judgment, we've all been there. 🫶
Quit (Q, Ctrl+Q) — closes the application entirely. bye bestie 💜
Preferences — where supported, brings up a dialog letting you configure your personal preferences about a particular game. Some of these preferences are specific to one game; others are common to all games.
- One option common to all games lets you turn off the one-key shortcuts like N for new game or Q for quit, so there's less chance of hitting them by accident. You can still access the same shortcuts with the Ctrl key. safe and sound. 🎀

🔑 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. Which means:

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 gives two or more people a way 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 from having seen the generated puzzle before anybody else. iconic party trick. 🏁
It's 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. That's 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 it'll 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's a colon, and after that comes 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. the receipts are there. 🧾

Note that the game parameter strings are not always identical between the two forms. For some games, there'll be parameter data provided with the random seed which isn't included in the descriptive game ID. That's because that parameter information is only relevant when generating puzzle grids, and isn't important when playing them. So, 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've 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. it remembers its roots. 🎀

The ‘Type’ menu, if present, may contain a list of preset game settings. Selecting one of these will start a new random game with the parameters specified. easy mode: activated. ✨

The ‘Type’ menu may also contain a ‘Custom’ option which lets you fine-tune game parameters. The parameters available are specific to each game and are described in the following sections. 🔍

Specifying game parameters on the command line 💬

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

okay so first things first, bestie: these games deliberately never save anything onto the computer they're running on. No high score tables. No saved preferences. Nothing. Why? Because the author figures at least some people are gonna play them at work, and those people will probably appreciate leaving as little evidence as possible 🙈 (we respect the stealth, honestly).

But — and here's the slay — if you do want a game to default to a particular set of parameters, you can just specify them on the command line. Periodt.

The easiest way to do this: set up the parameters you want using the ‘Type’ menu (see above), then pick ‘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 part = your game parameters (like the size of the playing area, and anything else you set via the ‘Type’ menu). 💅

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 head to the game ID selection, you'll see a string like:

o2x2#338686542711620

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

If you copy the entire game ID onto the command line, the game will start up in that exact specific game. Lowkey that's sometimes a more convenient way to jump into a particular game ID than pasting it into the game ID selection box. 🫶

(You could also grab the encoded game parameters using the ‘Specific’ menu option instead of ‘Random Seed’ — but if you do, some options, like the difficulty level in Solo, will be missing. See above for more deets on that.)

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 various other options:

--game
--load — these two determine whether the command-line argument is treated as specifying game parameters or a save file to load. Only one should be specified. If neither is specified, a guess is made based on the format of the argument. ✨
--generate n — if this is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a number of descriptive game IDs get invented and printed to standard output. Super 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 gets used. The most common use of this option is alongside --print, in which case its behaviour is slightly different — see below.
--delete-prefs — makes the puzzle delete the configuration file where its user preferences were stored, if there is one. 🧹
--print wxh — if specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a printed representation of one or more unsolved puzzles is sent to standard output, in PostScript format. 🖨️ On each page of puzzles there'll be w across and h down. If there are more puzzles than w×h, more than one page gets printed. If --generate has also been specified, the invented game IDs will be 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 --print 2x3 7x7w | lpr

will generate two pages of printed Net puzzles (each with 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 specified, 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 will be 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. ✨

--version — prints version information about the game, and then quits. 👑

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

--with-solutions — the set of pages filled with unsolved puzzles will be followed by the solutions to those puzzles. 🎀
--scale n — adjusts how big each puzzle is when printed. Larger numbers make puzzles bigger; the default is 1.0.
--colour — puzzles will be printed in colour, rather than in black and white (if supported by the puzzle). 🌈