This is a small solitaire game by Robert Roberds (BSX International). Like so many solitaire games, it relies far more on chance than strategy and is nearly impossible to beat. Thus its title is appropriate. You will utter this phrase a lot while playing it.

The basic idea of Dammit is simple. You lay out the cards one by one on a 4×4 grid. Your goal is to arrange the face cards like this:

K Q Q K
J     J
J     J
K Q Q K

As soon as the grid is full, you can remove all the tens and the pairs (or, if you play by the wimpy rules, groups) that that add up to ten. As soon as you get a face card that cannot be positioned properly, you lose. It is this last rule that make it especially difficult. However, you can beat it, as the screenshot above lays prove.

The game itself is not Roberds' invention. He says he learned it at college. But his is the first computer implementation I know (there are at least two Windows versions from the mid-90s, one called Dammit Solitaire, the other, better one, Square Royal).

The version I have played is 6.0 from 1989. Since Robert Roberds updated his games very often, version 1.0 may have been from the same year. Anyway it is remarkable in two ways:

1. It is one of the few games using high-resolution EGA graphics that takes the distortion into account. The pixels of this video mode are extremely oblong, a square, to be displayed properly, would have to have 4×3 pixels. Many authors simply ignored this.
2. It is the oldest PC game I know that actually requires a mouse. And it uses both mouse buttons.

This second point is especially interesting. In 1989, a mouse was still a fairly exotic piece of equipment in the PC world. Programmers porting games from the Amiga often did not bother to put in mouse support at all, regardless of the fact that it often rendered these games, like Emmanuelle, nearly unplayable.

But Dammit requires a mouse, it will not even start if it does not find one. Obviously it was not such a good idea, for by 1992 (version 12.0) Robert Roberds had patched it to be playable on rodent-free systems.

System Requirements

Well, as I have pointed out, the game needs a mouse. For some reason DR-DOS' mouse driver will not work: you can move the mouse only vertically along the right edge of the screen. CuteMouse works fine, but might not be compatible with all systems. It does lock up my IBM PS/2 50 completely, I could not play it on this machine at all.

If you want to play it on a recent computer, there should be no real problems, except that you cannot exit the game properly, but so what? Just <alt> - <tab> it away and close it Windows style. The screenshot on this page was taken on my Duron.