SGT‐SAMEGAME(6)

🌸 sgt-samegame(6) — Games 🌸

okay bestie, you found the manual for sgt-samegame, and it's section 6 (Games). It's a block-clearing puzzle, it's lowkey iconic, and it's about to eat your entire afternoon. 💅✨

✨ NAME ✨

sgt-samegame — Block-clearing puzzle. That's the name, that's the vibe, periodt. 🎀

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

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

sgt-samegame --version

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so you have a grid of coloured squares. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to clear that grid by highlighting contiguous regions of more than one coloured square. The bigger the region you highlight, the more points you get — and the faster you clear the arena. It's giving strategy, it's giving speedrun, it's giving main character energy. 🔥

If you clear the grid, you win. If you end up with nothing but single squares (i.e., there are no more clickable regions left), you lose. No in-between, bestie. 😭

Removing a region causes the rest of the grid to shuffle up: blocks that are suspended will fall down first, and then empty columns are filled from the right. So it's a whole cascade situation. ✨

Same Game was contributed to this collection by James Harvey. Respect. 👑

🎀 Same Game controls 🎀

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

• If you left-click an unselected region, it becomes selected (possibly clearing the current selection).
• If you left-click the selected region, it will be removed (and the rest of the grid shuffled immediately).
• If you right-click the selected region, it will be unselected.

The cursor keys move a cursor around the grid. Pressing the Space or Enter keys while the cursor is in an unselected region selects it; pressing Space or Enter again removes it as above.

(All the actions described below are also available.) — yes, the menu stuff and shortcuts still apply, don't worry. 🫶

🍓 Same Game parameters 🍓

These parameters are available from the ‘Custom...’ option on the ‘Type’ menu.

• Width, Height — Size of grid in squares.
• No. of colours — Number of different colours used to fill the grid; the more colours, the fewer large regions of colour and thus the more difficult it is to successfully clear the grid.
• Scoring system — Controls the precise mechanism used for scoring. With the default system, ‘(n-2)^2’, only regions of three squares or more will score any points at all. With the alternative ‘(n-1)^2’ system, regions of two squares score a point each, and larger regions score relatively more points.
• Ensure solubility — If this option is ticked (the default state), generated grids will be guaranteed to have at least one solution.

If you turn it off, the game generator will not try to guarantee soluble grids; it will, however, still ensure that there are at least 2 squares of each colour on the grid at the start (since a grid with exactly one square of a given colour is definitely insoluble). Grids generated with this option disabled may contain more large areas of contiguous colour, leading to opportunities for higher scores; they can also take less time to generate.

🌈 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 🧚

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 🎀

So if your game has a ‘Type’ menu, bestie, it might be packing a whole list of preset game settings. Tap one of those and boom — you get a brand new random game using exactly the parameters it says. ✨

It might also have a ‘Custom’ option, which is your little fine-tuning station for game parameters. And heads up: the parameters you can tweak are specific to each game, and they're all laid out in the sections coming up. 👑

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🌸 Specifying game parameters on the command line 🌸

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

Okay so the games in this collection deliberately never save info onto your computer. Like, ever. They have no high score tables and no saved preferences. (The reason is that the author expects at least some people to be playing these at work, and those people will probably appreciate leaving as little evidence as possible! 💀😂 iconic, honestly.)

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

Easiest way to do it: set up the parameters you want using the ‘Type’ menu (see just above ⬆️), then pick ‘Random Seed’ from the ‘Game’ or ‘File’ menu (also see above). The text sitting in the ‘Game ID’ box comes in two parts separated by a hash. The first part is the one that represents the game parameters — like the size of the playing area, for example, and anything else you set using the ‘Type’ menu. 🫶

Run the game with just that parameter text on the command line, and it'll start up with the settings you specified. So simple. ✨

For example: run Cube (see sgt-cube(6)), select ‘Octahedron’ from the ‘Type’ menu, then go to the game ID selection, and 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

Now, if you copy the entire game ID onto the command line, the game will start up in that specific game that was described. Sometimes that's just a more convenient way to launch a particular game ID than pasting it into the game ID selection box. 🎀

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

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💖 Unix command-line options 💖

This section only applies to the Unix port. 🐧

Besides being able to specify game parameters on the command line (see above 👀), there are a bunch of other options too:

• --game
• --load — these two respectively decide whether the command-line argument is treated as specifying game parameters or as a save file to load. Only one should be specified. If neither of them is given, the game makes a guess based on the format of the argument. 🧚
• --generate n — if this is set, instead of showing you a puzzle, a number of descriptive game IDs get invented and printed on standard output. Super useful for getting at the game generation algorithms without necessarily using the frontend. If game parameters are specified on the command-line, those get used to generate the game IDs; otherwise a default set of parameters is used. The most common use of this option is paired with --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 this is set, instead of showing you a puzzle, a printed representation of one or more unsolved puzzles goes 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 was also 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 that --generate produces. For example:

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

will generate two pages of printed Net puzzles (each one 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 that affect printing — see below.

• --save file-prefix [ --save-suffix file-suffix ] — if this is set, instead of showing you a puzzle, saved-game files for one or more unsolved puzzles get written to files constructed from the supplied prefix and/or suffix. 💾 If --generate was also 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 that --generate produces. 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 gets 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 get printed in colour rather than in black and white (if supported by the puzzle). 🌈

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

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

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okay bestie that's the whole page, you ate that 💅 this was sgt-samegame from the sgt-puzzles collection, dated July 2025 — now go forth and slay some tiles, no cap 🎀✨🦋