Dominoes Puzzle – Answer: NONSTOP – By Kenny Young

 

The instructions appear to be standard enough, but an important aspect is omitted; the board does not contain all of the dominoes. In fact, seven of them are missing. This makes it very dicey going as to which dominoes can be placed!

 

In the board, there are a full complement of 0’s, 1’s, 2’s, and 4’s. Other numbers have one or two missing squares. There is no way to derive from this level of information which dominoes are missing; the only way is to solve the board. Starting with the 0’s, 1’s, 2’s, and 4’s, about 15 dominoes can be placed. Past that point some clever deduction is required in order to make substantial progress.

 

There are some areas on the board where the same two or three dominoes can be laid in two different ways to fill the same space. Modulo these trivial variations, there is a single solution:

 

 

Now we can finally determine that the missing dominoes are the (3, 11), the (5, 10), the (6, 8), the (6, 10), the (7, 8), the (7, 12), and the (9, 11). Converting the total number of pips on each domino to a letter, we get NONPOST, which anagrams to the more useful NONSTOP.