Show HN: Domino Fit – Domino Tiling Puzzle
dominofit.isotropic.usDomino fit is a domino tiling puzzler I spent a lot of time both making and playing. Its like sudoku but with a geometric angle, the sum of the dots must match the row and column numbers.
It's running on Betsy, the server under my couch, and was made with typescript. I'm proud of it.
I hope you give it a shot, and appreciate any thoughts or criticisms! Sometimes my mind wanders until I decide I want a "01" and I tap on the "01" tile at the bottom to select it. If the "01" is alredy selected, it switchs to the "02". But I tapped the "01" to select the "01" in spite it's already selected! (I have the same problem with the "02".) My recomendation is to change the logic of the selection at the bottom. Instead of switching each time, I'd like that if I tap on the left bottom I select the "01", and if I tap on the right bottom I select the "02". I will try to fix this, sounds frustrating. Most likely I will change the default to what yall suggest and keep the way it works now as a settings option just for me because my muscle memory can't handle the change ha. Looking forward to this change! I am constantly switching to the wrong piece by clicking on the piece I want when it's already selected. Another thing that would help me is if it showed a ghosted image of where the piece will be before I place it (like Starcraft, Age of Empires, and a million other games do). If you had that, I would never place the wrong piece accidentally, or accidentally in the wrong place. Great game, really fun! Hey, I love the recent UI update! Thanks so much! NP! I like it too :D Just in case: Nice game! I played the new set today, and I think the balance between the 01 and 02 is very good and make the puzzles very interesting. Excellent game. Excellent attitude towards feedback. Keep up with the good stuff! Yes, it was a fun game but that was my only minor criticism. I did that all the time. I came to make the same suggestion: the domino's at the bottom should only select that domino, not toggle between the two. Really annoyed me too. Should really be a radio button behavior instead of a toggle. This post is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342649 I can’t get over how smooth and satisfying it is, not to mention how fun the game itself is! Very well built, I really enjoyed playing it! I think there would be more chance of it going viral if there was one difficult level per day, rather than 5 increasing in difficulty. Fun game! But please change the tutorial example to something where the dots don't align with each other on the dominos (this is obviously not required, but part of the usual domino game and therefore it's easy to make that wrong assumption here) It would also be nice to see how the domino will be dropped, I often put it down off by one square. Maybe a faint outline under the cursor, or even snapped to the grid. TYVM! Ok, fixed up the tutorial. The domino shadow is a good suggestion, hope I can put it in before the wife gets back from her trip I really enjoyed this! I've played lots of "Magnets" from Tatham's Puzzle Collection [0], which is similar but not the same. Your game was really well polished and easy to quickly grok. Well done. A little intimidating at first but eventually all the pieces fit into place. I feel like the challenge is in finding early on the rows/columns that can only be one exact combination of pieces and then building from there. Also looking for odd numbers means there must be a 1-piece in that alignment. If you like this style of puzzle, I highly recommend Simon Tatham's Puzzles on android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.boyle.chr...). It has implementations of a dozen or so puzzles including a domino puzzle not unlike this one. And it has no ads or microtransactions to boot. Simon Tatham's puzzles are also available on the web on his site: Some time ago I found this implementation: https://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/
I think it has a more pleasant ui. I love this. The app is less than 4MB and with so many puzzle types! I see it as a kind of "perfect app" in that it does what it sets out to do very well and does exactly nothing else. If only all mobile games were the same... Thank you for no timer. Timers ruin puzzles. "youwin3.mp3" sounds a little harsh to my ear for some reason. I looked at the sound in Audacity and it wasn't clipping — but sounded like it. Ar first I didn’t understand that you couldn’t rotate.
Would love to have “R” reset the board. Yep, I got stuck for 10 minutes on the first level because I didn't realize the pieces couldn't rotate. It's much easier to solve once you know about that constraint! A few more bits of feedback after playing it a while: - Move the "next board" arrow to appear within the playfield. It feels weird to move the mouse outside the playfield just for that, and then back to the playfield to hit the "start" button. Just have them both appear in the same place. - Rework the progress/trophy icon to make it clear there are 5 stages. It gave me the impression there were 4 stage and that you receive the trophy as a reward after the four stage (when the row of dots is full). These are relatively minor, though, it's a fun game! At first, I didn't realize that all of the spaces must be filled by tiles. Perhaps that could be made more obvious. Nice game! This is great! I was hooked after the first game. I’m glad these are a challenge, but not mind-bendingly difficult. Thanks for making and sharing, I love it. I really enjoyed playing it, seems to hit the right sweet spot of difficulty. The earlier puzzles (1-4) seemed a bit easy at first, but not so easy to deter me from continuing. With #5 I needed a bit of back and forth, but not frustratingly much. Also I really like the graphics and sound, it's pleasant to look at and to listen to, which is important for a puzzle game imo. That was very fun! Are the puzzles handmade or procedurally generated? Yey these comments are making me smile. A bit of both, made a generator that spits out games and then I played 10 procedurally generated levels and picked the ones I liked. In general my favorite levels are the 7x7 with 5 stones, you can legit logic them out if you are patient. I only put in one since it takes quite a bit of practice to get to that point. You should be smiling - this is really a decent puzzle game. And the last level did take a couple tries before I got it, but that was great. The earlier levels were too quick and easy once you figured out a couple patterns to look for. Everyone is correct that this needs a better intro and better overall UX. But the concept is solid enough that I think this idea could go somewhere. Well done. I love this approach. Great work. I played it a couple of days and it's great. I agree about the selecting the different tiles, it's not the smoothest but it's very easy to understand how that works. The whole puzzle really explains itself well with the numbers turning green. I love how I'm building a set of heuristics (this space only fits a horizontal, if I need X points on a vertical, I need doubles...) in my mind to solve these puzzles step by step, just like with a sudoku, but very much it's own. Maybe tapping on the left selects the left piece, right the right, and middle toggles? But that's just booked shedding. Great, polished puzzle! This is fun! The exact type of game my wife loves. Agree on the other comment about misclicking off-by-one placement errors on a phone touchscreen. Small feedback, the “copy” button doesnt seem to work on iOS Safari. Otherwise would be a good rip of the wordle emoji share ability. Really fun! Reminds me a lot of Nikoli puzzles[0], which I have spent many, many hours playing. Please change the red/green colors on the row numbers, it's difficult for colorblind people. I didn't even realize it was changing colors from green to red when I had too many dots. In general, though, a fun game and looks very polished! Tyvm :D. There should be a colorblind mode in the settings (hotkey combo is szs). There's a kid I want to show the game to but he's colorblind too. The colorblind mode is just using blue instead of green. While it might work for some people, I'd suggest to redesign. Don't convey information with color alone. For example, you could switch the boldness, circle the number, or something else. The goal is to make it playable even if my goal setting is set to grayscale mode. Once you do this, you may be able to get rid of the colorblind setting. Alternative suggestion: instead of showing the target number, show instead the difference between the current sum and the target. So 0 would tell me the line is complete. A negative number would show there's an error and I need to remove a piece. Today I got "wizard" on one of the levels! What does it mean? My entire friend group and I love the game, thank you for making it <3 Very satisfying! And definitely unlike any other puzzle I've seen. Nicely done. Edit: just finished the set. This is wordle-level addicting at this point. Different strategies to think of, and insanely satisfying endgame. It’s a nice puzzle, but because the two dominoes only have one fixed orientation some of the puzzles end up being a little too easy as the blocked spaces strongly limit the possible tilings. I think I did at least one without having to look at the row and column counts. If you’re trying to make this a daily thing then I think I understand that decision on difficulty, and I may have played too many games of magnets in Simon Tatham’s puzzle collection so I may not be your target market. :-) Is there only one possible solution for each board? Today I felt like deriving contradictions was a lot harder today than usual, but I still ended up with the correct answers. I think there should be a way to mark dominos as "confirmed" vs "guesses", because not everyone is going to have working memory to remember which tiles laid down are "guesses" for deriving contradictions. Today, the last puzzle had at least two solutions. I'd prefer that the puzzles were always unambiguous. I’ve been playing every day it’s relaxing, quick, fun. I added to my Home Screen so I don’t lose it. Pretty cool, except for one major UI flaw. When there are only two options, clicking on either one should toggle between them. I feel like this was previously the default, so I’m left wondering why this no longer works? This is really fun, wonder how many different dominos you could introduce and still be able to generate puzzles with a single solution I passed the first level right now. The game is OK but there are a couple of things that confused me. The small example at the home page didn't prepare me to play the level. I had to place many pieces on the board before I realized that the sum of the number of dots must match the number on the rows and columns. The example didn't lead me to that. I think it'd be nice to have some harder puzzles, it seems a bit too straightforward once you figure out the tactics ATM. This was really good, really intuitive design, the sound added a ton to the experience, thanks for building and sharing! I love this game! It's really satisfying and addictive. Nice work. One suggestion: I have a friend who is color-blind and has a hard time seeing the red and green numbers. Maybe add a visual indicator? Thanks! Love it. I'd appreciate an endless mode that's not clock gated. Thanks! This is a lot of fun. I enjoy tumbling the ideas in my head. Surprised how much I enjoyed this. Great work! If you made a mobile app with, say, 40 puzzles I could easily see myself throwing 5 bucks your way. Perfect subway game. Really fun and clever. The N64 Mario font is a nice touch ;) When winning turning green numbers black makes it feel like you lost the game. Numbers should stay green until a new game is started. Really enjoyed playing this. Larger board, would be great. Also had experienced the switching issue, but everything else was smooth. Super cool! Maybe a bigger board would be cool too :D Would also love to hear about how you designed the algorithm for generating puzzles! TY. I am a fan of 7x7 with 5 stones, 8x8 I need to revisit (I haven't tried 8x8 with stones, was playing without stones for a while but they add a lot to the game). Absolutely yes- Funny story, originally it was generating 10kish tilings for a 6x6 board with 2 stones. but when I moved one of the stones over we would get... 0. WHAT? Apparently there is an entire field about dominoes (of course) and I had stumbled into something called the "Mutilated Chessboard Problem". It's impossible to tile a chessboard that has the top left and bottom right square removed. 62 open squares, doesn't matter, it's untilable. Crazy. Many boards are like this. There is actually a very neat proof as to why, too. Placing a domino tile removes 1 black and 1 white square. So if you have e.g. 10 black and 12 white squares you're done for, you will always end up with the 0 black squares and 2 white squares remaining. With this intuition I was able to speed up the generator by skipping these types of boards. As for it's implementation, it is a bit brute force, it recurses over a 64 bit bitboard to find all the possible domino tilings for a particular board, using bitwise operators for moves. I then use the 01 02 domino values and group them by the row/column numbers, so I can eliminate multiple solutions (less fun imo). There are definitely trillions of tilings, so after calculating all of them for a particular board and shuffling them only the first N are stored and then saved to a sqlite database. Playing this on Android Brave browser using dark theme is not possible.
The dots do not show. Love it! Hope there was a level selector of some sort if you exit the browser. Had a fun few minutes playing the game. Thanks and keep up the hard work. I loved It. Inspired me to build a clone to learn Svelte. I'll try that this week. Really nice, thanks for the discovery and the work behind it! Loved it! Well made and engaging. Is there just one solution for each puzzle? Thank you! Yes, only one solution. Very much enjoyed this, my avg completion time was 267 Cool game! Curious, why are there numbers on both sides? It really reminds me of picross, which is a good thing. Great game and well built. Love playing it. I couldn't stop playing. very fun game This was fun! Thanks for sharing Hey nice work, I enjoyed that Great game, enjoyed it a lot! This is awesome! Great work! Love it out of the gate. DOMINO FIT #1