User's Manual
Game Description
Dominomial is a kind of domino game using a custom tile set which represent the multiplication table rules. Four players participate in a Dominomial game: a human who wants to learn the multiplication rules and three computer players (so-called bots). The bots are named after great Ancient Greek mathematicians Archimedes, Euclid and Pythagoras.
The tiles of bot players are shown on the right side of the game area, the tiles of a human player are located under the game area.
The game starts with a random tile distribution - 9 are given to each player. The tile which has 5×5 on its right side is always deposited first, hence the player who has this tile is the one to move first. Then, the right to move is passed clockwise. The player who has the right to move at the moment has his tiles highlighted.
A player who gets rid of his tiles is the winning one. Once this has happened, the GAME OVER message is displayed. To start a new game, one has to press a NEW button.
The tiles are deposited so that a correct multiplication rule is formed by adjacent tiles. If a player is not able to move with respect to this rule, he may skip this move. If this happens to a bot, he says "I cannot drop any tile". A human player is supposed to press a PASS button to skip his move.
If a player presses the PASS button in error, that is, he can actually make a valid move, the program highlights the tile and displays the following warning, the right to move is not passed to the next player.
At the left side of some tiles there may be a yellow square. This indicates that two distinct tiles can be attached to such a tile rather than one (more common case).
If a tile is put on the game table, its ends which can be attached to are highlighted with gray color. If the tile's vacant side is not highlighted, all possible extensions were already deposited.
Since the game area may be large, the program displays only a small part of it in its window. To see the other areas, the contents of the window should be scrolled using either cursor buttons, mouse wheel (to scroll left or right press Shift while scrolling the wheel), or the scroll buttons which show up once the mouse is close to appropriate window border.
Usually we are not interested in all the tiles on the table, but rather the one's we can attach something to. These ends are displayed in a special area of the program window - Navigator, which is located to the left of the human player tiles. This allows a player to check whether he can deposit anything on the table. Also, upon click on any of the tile ends in the navigator, the area where this end is located will be shown in the navigator window.
For each deposited tile the human player is given points, for any mistaken attempt to deposit a tile or to pass the move, the points are deducted. The current number of points is displayed with green color on the indicator. The program also remembers maximum number of points since the web page was loaded in a browser. This top score is displayed with grey color and allows to evaluate the player's progress on the road to mastering multiplication.
Hints to improve the learning effect
- Don't try to memorize all the rules at once. Try to concentrate on those which are played by you and a bot who plays before you (Pythagoras). You may ignore the rules played by other two bots.
- For better understanding, speak the rule Pythagoras uses. While depositing a tile, try to speak the rule you use too.
- You will make a better progress if you try to find all the tiles you can possibly play, not just the one you see first.