SGT‐TOWERS(6)

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

💖 sgt-towers(6) 💖

Games — bestie, this is the manual for sgt-towers, the tower-placing Latin square puzzle. Yes it's a game section page. Yes it is that girl. Let's go. 🏗️✨

🌈 NAME 🌈

sgt-towers — a tower-placing Latin square puzzle, aka the thing that will absolutely eat your whole afternoon 👑

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

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

sgt-towers --version

🧚 DESCRIPTION 🧚

Okay so picture this: you've got a square grid. On every single square of that grid you can build a tower, and its height is anything from 1 all the way up to the size of the grid. And around the outside edge? Numeric clues. Little numbers just vibing on the border. 🎀

Your whole task is to build a tower on every square, such that:

  • Each row contains every possible height of tower once 💅
  • Each column contains every possible height of tower once 💅
  • Each numeric clue describes the number of towers you'd be able to see if you looked into the square from that direction — assuming shorter towers get hidden behind taller ones. So like, in a 5×5 grid, a clue marked 5 means the five tower heights have to appear in increasing order (because otherwise bestie there is NO way you'd see all five towers), while a clue marked 1 means the tallest tower — the one marked 5 — has to come first. 🌸

In harder or larger puzzles, some towers will be handed to you already, on top of the clues around the edge, and some of the edge clues might just be... missing. Spiritually absent. 🙈

This puzzle shows up on the web under a bunch of different names, especially ‘Skyscrapers’, but honestly I don't know who first invented it. Credit where credit is due and all, but like. Unknown. 💀

🎮 Towers controls 🎮

Towers shares a whole lotta its control system with Solo, Unequal and Keen. Iconic lineage honestly.

To play Towers, simply click the mouse in any empty square and then type a digit on the keyboard to fill that square with a tower of the given height. Messed up? Easy fix, no stress — click the mouse in the incorrect square and press Space to clear it again (or just use the Undo feature, she's right there 🫶).

If you right-click in a square and then type a number, that number goes into the square as a ‘pencil mark’. You can stack pencil marks for multiple numbers in the same square, no cap. But heads up: a square that has an actual tower in it can't also hold pencil marks. One or the other, bestie. ✨

The game pays zero attention to pencil marks, so what you use them for is entirely your business: reminders that a particular square needs another look once you know more about a particular number, lists of the possible numbers in a given square, or literally whatever else you feel like. Main character freedom. 👑

Wanna erase one pencil mark? Right-click in the square and type the same number again. Poof. 🦋

All the pencil marks in a square get wiped when you left-click and type a number, or when you left-click and press Space. Right-clicking and pressing Space will also erase pencil marks. So many ways to clear the vibes.

Same deal as Solo: the cursor keys work in conjunction with the digit keys to set numbers or pencil marks. Cursor keys move a highlight around the grid, type a digit to enter it in the highlighted square. And pressing Return toggles the highlight into a mode where you can enter or remove pencil marks. Cute little mode switch. 🎀

Pressing M fills in a full set of pencil marks in every square that does not have a main digit in it. Mass pencil mark drop. 💅

Left-clicking a clue marks it as done (greys it out), or unmarks it if it's already marked. And holding Control or Shift while pressing an arrow key likewise marks any clue in the given direction. Efficient.

(All the actions described below are also available.)

🌸 Towers parameters 🌸

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

  • Grid size — Specifies the size of the grid. Lower limit is 3; upper limit is 9. And why 9, you ask? Because the user interface would become more difficult with ‘digits’ bigger than 9! That's the whole reason. One digit per square, periodt. ✋
  • Difficulty — Controls the difficulty of the generated puzzle. At Unreasonable level, some backtracking will be required, but the solution should still be unique. The remaining levels require increasingly complex reasoning to avoid having to backtrack. Choose your fighter. 🔥

💜 Towers user preferences 💜

On platforms that support user preferences, the ‘Preferences’ option on the ‘Game’ menu will let you configure the style of the game display. If you don't like the three-dimensional mode, selecting ‘2D’ switches to a simpler display style where towers are shown by just writing their height in the square. Flat. Minimal. Lowkey a serve. ✨

👑 Common actions 👑

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

(On Mac OS X, to conform with local user interface standards, these actions live on the ‘File’ and ‘Edit’ menus instead. Different platform, different rules, we respect it. 🫶)

  • New game (‘N’, Ctrl+‘N’) — Starts a new game, with a random initial state. Fresh start, clean slate, new era. 🌈
  • Restart game — Resets the current game to its initial state. (And yes, this can be undone. No scary commitments here.)
  • 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). Time travel privileges. ⭐
  • 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! Some games are just not paper girlies. 💀)
  • Undo (‘U’, Ctrl+‘Z’, Ctrl+‘_’, ‘*’) — Undoes a single move. (You can undo moves back to the start of the session. All the way back. No judgement.)
  • Redo (‘R’, Ctrl+‘R’, ‘#’) — Redoes a previously undone move. We love a comeback. 🔥
  • 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. Some are shy.)
  • 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. Peek, then rewind. 💅

  • Quit (‘Q’, Ctrl+‘Q’) — Closes the application entirely. Goodbye bestie, until next time. 🦋
  • 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. Safety rails, but make them cute. ✨

📝 Specifying games with the game ID

Okay bestie, this is the part where you learn how to save a game and bring it back later — even on somebody else's computer running the exact same puzzle. There are two ways to do it, and they are not the same thing. Let's get into it. 💖

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 enough all by itself to reconstruct precisely the same game at a later date. Iconic behaviour, honestly.

You can type either one of those pieces of text right back into the program (through those same Specific or Random Seed menu options) later, 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? 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 that got fed as input into the random number generator that made 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 jot 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 is the 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 from 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. Lowkey a superpower.
  • 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'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, though, the program will be able to show you the descriptive game ID derived from that random seed. No cap. 🌈

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. Why? Because that parameter information is only relevant when generating puzzle grids, and is not 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. Picture this: suppose you have Solo set to ‘Advanced’ difficulty level, and then a friend wants your help with a ‘Trivial’ puzzle. The friend reads out a random seed specifying ‘Trivial’ difficulty, and you type it in. The program will generate you the same ‘Trivial’ grid 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 it was previously set on. The program remembers its own vibe. 💅

🎀 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. One tap and you're playing. Slay. ✨

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.

🖥️ 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!) 🕵️♀️ Not a single crumb left behind.

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. Yes, queen, paste it straight into your shell. 👑

(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 — one of the two options that determine what the command-line argument means.
  • --load — the other one.

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.

  • --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.
  • --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. 🖨️✨

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. 🍓

  • --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).

👀 SEE ALSO

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

Okay bestie, that's the whole manual — literally every last flag, seed and slash of documentation, and you ate it. 💖 This page is sgt-towers from the sgt-puzzles crew, dated July 2025, sitting pretty as SGT‐TOWERS(6) in the manual pages. Go build some towers, queen. 👑🦋

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