How to play Pips
Pips is a daily logic puzzle played with dominoes. There are three boards each day, easy, medium and hard. Place every domino so that each colored region meets its rule.
The rules
- 1Each domino covers two neighboring cells. You can turn it any way you like.
- 2Every cell on the board gets covered, and every domino gets used.
- 3A number in a region means its pips must add up to exactly that number.
- 4A less-than or greater-than sign means the region's total must be below or above the number shown.
- 5An equals sign means every cell in the region shows the same number; a not-equal sign means they all differ.
- 6Cells with no rule can take any value.
Tips for solving
- Start with the tightest regions: a single cell with a sum, a sum of 0, or a large total spread over few cells.
- Count the dominoes. If only one domino has a 6, there's only one place it can go in a region that needs a high total.
- Equal regions often take a double domino, so check where the doubles can fit.
- Look at the board's shape. Narrow corridors and dead ends force how dominoes can lie.
How NudgeHint's Pips hints work
Our first hint spells out every region's rule and how many doubles you have.
After that you can see one domino placed, then about half the board, then the full solution, separately for each level.
Open today's Pips hintsPips questions
Is there only one solution?
Our hints show the solution published with the puzzle. On some boards another arrangement also meets every rule, so a different layout from ours can still be valid.
What do the numbers in the corners mean?
They are the region rules: a plain number is an exact sum, and < or > set a limit on the total.