Dominosa

Rules of the game

Rectangle 7x8 is tiled (in an irregular way) with the full set of dominoes (28 pieces). What you see is the number of dots in each square of the rectangle.

Your task is to recreate borders between pieces. Click on the border between pieces to set/remove edge.

To get new puzzle just reload the page.

Variants

Several obvious variants of this puzzles are described on a variants page.

Obfuscated javascript

I have also written obfuscated version of this game that takes less than 1k. It is slightly crippled -- does not detect end of game and does not allow to draw separators (small black bars) at table borders -- but still usable.

domino.nsg.htm -- 1013 bytes

Author

The game was written in javascript by Andrew Nikitin. I would appreciate any kind of feedback.

Credits

I've learnt this game from Martin Gardner's book [1]. He claims that the game was designed by Lech Pijanowski. I first read about it in russian translation [2].

According to Michael Mendelsohn (rec.games.computer.puzzles regular), he has a small booklet printed in 1924 in Germany, which claims that the game was invented in 1874 ff., patented 1893 (German Reichs-Patent-Nr 71539) bei Richard Osa (Pseudonym for O.S. Adler) and published by same in 1894 under the name of "Dominosa" (but reportedly sold badly since the game was yet unknown). The game was included in "Kurschners Jahrbuch" (almanac) in 1899, and in 1912 the first edition of my booklet "Sperrdomino und Dominosa" was published in Züllchow bei Stettin by "Verlag der Zullchower Anstalten", an educational institution.

Assuming O.S.Adler has priority, this type of puzzle should be called "Dominosa omnibus", being one manner of playing Dominosa. "Triplet Dominosa" uses a 36-piece Domino set (ranging from 0:0 to 7:7), and aims for triplets - three squares of equal value in a row.

References

  1. Mathematical Circus. Martin Gardner. Alfred A. Knopf, 1979
    2.
  2. Математические новеллы. Мартин Гарднер. М.:Мир
  3. Dominosa. Richard Osa, 1894
  4. German Reichs Patent Nr. 71539. Richard Osa (pseudonim for O. S. Adler), 1893
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