Descartes Enigma is a nonogram or "paint by numbers" game, familiar to gamers as Picross (picture crossword). The game is named after René Descartes, who developed the Cartesian coordinate system, which the graphs in nonograms somewhat resemble. For each row and column you're told how many squares in a row should be colored in, in the order that the groups appear. A row that has the hint "4 5 2" indicates that there is a group of 4, followed by a group of 5, followed by a group of 2, though it doesn't tell you where the groups are. Using the information from both the columns and rows, you can gradually deduce where the colored blocks would have to be, or not be, and you fill in the picture by left-clicking to color a square in, or right cicking to indicate the square is blank. There are 200 pictures and over 49 000 computer-generated puzzles in this game, with only 35 pictures and 10 computer-generated puzzles in the shareware version.

Added by DOSGuy

Screenshots

Win16
GDI

Win9x
GDI

Downloads

Complete version history:

Availability

Everett Kaser Software still sells this game for $19.95 by download or CD-ROM.