SGT‐GUESS(6)

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

✨ SGT‐GUESS(6) — Games ✨

okay so bestie, this is the manual page for sgt-guess, and it lives in section 6 — that's Games, periodt. Grab a snack, we're going in. 🍓💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

sgt-guess — Combination-guessing puzzle 💖

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

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

sgt-guess --version

💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

Picture this: you've got a set of coloured pegs, and your whole mission is to reproduce a predetermined sequence of them — chosen by the computer, no take-backs — within a certain number of guesses. It's giving puzzle, it's giving pressure. 😭

Every guess gets marked with the number of correctly-coloured pegs in the correct places (in black), plus the number of correctly-coloured pegs in the wrong places (in white). So it's feedback, but make it fashion. 🖤🤍

This game is also known — and marketed, mainly by Hasbro — as the board game ‘Mastermind’, with 6 colours, 4 pegs per row, and 10 guesses. However, this version allows custom settings of number of colours (up to 10), number of pegs per row, and number of guesses. So you can make it your own lil chaos. 🌈

Guess was contributed to this collection by James Harvey. King behaviour, no cap. 👑

🎮 Guess controls 🎮

This game can be played with either the keyboard or the mouse. Pick your fighter. ⌨️🖱️

With the mouse, drag a coloured peg from the tray on the left-hand side to its required position in the current guess; pegs may also be dragged from current and past guesses to copy them elsewhere. To remove a peg, drag it off its current position to somewhere invalid. Bye bye, peg. 👋

Right-clicking in the current guess adds a ‘hold’ marker; pegs that have hold markers will be automatically added to the next guess after marking. It's like a sticky note for future you. 💖

Alternatively, with the keyboard:

  • The up and down cursor keys can be used to select a peg colour.
  • The left and right keys select a peg position.
  • The Enter key places a peg of the selected colour in the chosen position.
  • ‘D’ or Backspace removes a peg.
  • Space adds a hold marker.

The number keys can also be used to insert pegs: ‘1’ inserts the top-most colour, ‘2’ the second one, and so forth. These also move the peg cursor to the right. Pressing ‘L’ will label the pegs with their numbers.

Pressing ‘h’ or ‘?’ will fill the current guess with a suggested guess. Using this is not recommended for 10 or more pegs as it is slow. So maybe don't unless you got time, bestie. 🐌

When the guess is complete, the smaller feedback pegs will be highlighted; clicking on these (or moving the peg cursor to them with the arrow keys and pressing the space bar or Enter key) will mark the current guess, copy any held pegs to the next guess, and move the ‘current guess’ marker. Slay. ✨

If you correctly position all the pegs the solution will be displayed below; if you run out of guesses (or select ‘Solve...’) the solution will also be revealed. So either you ate or the game spills the tea. 😭

(All the actions described below are also available.)

🎛️ Guess parameters 🎛️

These parameters are available from the ‘Custom...’ option on the ‘Type’ menu. The default game matches the parameters for the board game ‘Mastermind’.

  • Colours — Number of colours the solution is chosen from; from 2 to 10 (more is harder). So if you pick 10, bestie, good luck. 💀
  • Pegs per guess — Number of pegs per guess (more is harder).
  • Guesses — Number of guesses you have to find the solution in (fewer is harder).
  • Allow blanks — Allows blank pegs to be given as part of a guess (makes it easier, because you know that those will never be counted as part of the solution). This is turned off by default.

Note that this doesn't allow blank pegs in the solution; if you really wanted that, use one extra colour.

  • Allow duplicates — Allows the solution (and the guesses) to contain colours more than once; this increases the search space (making things harder), and is turned on by default.

💅 Guess user preferences 💅

On platforms that support user preferences, the ‘Preferences’ option on the ‘Game’ menu will let you configure whether pegs are labelled with their numbers. Unlike the ‘L’ key, this will persist between games. So set it once and it stays — iconic. ✨

🌈 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.
  • Restart game — Resets the current game to its initial state. (This can be undone.)
  • 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).

  • 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 ✨

okay bestie so there are two whole ways to save a game spec out of a puzzle and then bring it back later, or hand it off so somebody else's copy of the same puzzle can rebuild it exactly. 💖

The ‘Specific’ and ‘Random Seed’ options from the ‘Game’ menu (or the ‘File’ menu, if you're on Mac OS X) each show you a lil piece of text — a ‘game ID’ — and that text is enough to reconstruct precisely the same game later. iconic behavior honestly.

You can type either one of those pieces of text back into the program (same ‘Specific’ or ‘Random Seed’ menu options, same energy) 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) — more on that below. 👇

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 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. race era 🏁
  • 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. glow up for your newspaper sudoku fr fr.
  • 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. (one-way street, bestie 🛣️)

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. 💅 your settings literally don't get hijacked.

🎀 The ‘Type’ menu 🎀

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.

The ‘Type’ menu may also contain a ‘Custom’ option which allows you to fine-tune game parameters. The parameters available are specific to each game and are described in the following sections. customize ur lil world ✨

🌸 Specifying game parameters on the command line 🌸

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

The games in this collection deliberately do not ever save information on to the computer they run on: they have no high score tables and no saved preferences. (This is because I expect at least some people to play them at work, and those people will probably appreciate leaving as little evidence as possible!) 🤫 no digital footprints bestie

However, if you do want to arrange for one of these games to default to a particular set of parameters, you can specify them on the command line.

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

If you run the game with just that parameter text on the command line, it will start up with the settings you specified. 🫶

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 will 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.

If you copy the entire game ID on to the command line, the game will start up in the specific game that was described. This is occasionally a more convenient way to start a particular game ID than by pasting it into the game ID selection box.

(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.)

In addition to being able to specify game parameters on the command line (see above), there are various other options:

  • --game — hmm wait, this one and the next one are a pair, look below 👇
  • --load — these options respectively 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 of these options is specified, a guess is made based on the format of the argument. 🤔 it literally just vibes off the format
  • --generate n — If this option is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a number of descriptive game IDs will be invented and printed on standard output. This is useful for gaining access to the game generation algorithms without necessarily using the frontend.

If game parameters are specified on the command-line, they will be used to generate the game IDs; otherwise a default set of parameters will be 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 option causes the puzzle to delete the configuration file in which its user preferences were stored, if there is one. 💀 bye bye prefs
  • --print wxh — If this option is 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 will be w across and h down. If there are more puzzles than w×*h*, more than one page will be 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 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. 🖨️ real paper?? in this economy??

There are various other options which affect printing; see below.

  • --save file-prefix [ --save-suffix file-suffix ] — If this option is 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. 💾 twelve of them, bestie, named in order

  • --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. the answer key, bestie 🔑 (no peeking 👀)
  • --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). 🌈 (if supported, bestie, don't come for me)

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

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

and that's a wrap on sgt-guess(6) 🎀✨ sgt‐guess (sgt‐puzzles), July 2025 — tysm for reading bestie, go slay some puzzles, you've got this fr fr 🫶👑

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