How to play Pips

The basic rules

Each board is a grid of cells grouped into colored regions, plus a tray of dominoes. Every domino has two halves, and each half shows 0 to 6 dots.

• Place every domino from the tray on the board. Each domino covers two neighbouring cells.
• Drag a domino to move it; tap it to rotate it.
• The puzzle is solved when the board is full and every region's condition is true.
• If every domino is used but the game says one is in the wrong spot, at least one region's condition is still broken.

What the region conditions mean

Each colored region carries a small label that tells you what its dots must add up to or how they must relate:

• A number — the dots inside the region must add up to exactly that number. A region marked 0 can only hold blank halves.
• = — every dot value in the region must be the same number.
• ≠ — every dot value in the region must be a different number.
• < a number — the dots must add up to less than that number.
• > a number — the dots must add up to more than that number.
• No label — the cells still need to be covered, but anything goes.

Regions don't have to line up with dominoes. Some regions contain only half of a domino, so one domino often counts toward two different regions at once.

Easy, Medium and Hard

The three daily boards share the same rules. Easy boards use the fewest dominoes; Medium and Hard add more dominoes and more regions, so you often have to hold several possibilities in your head before anything is forced.

Solving strategy

Pips rewards the same habit as Sudoku: place what is forced, then let each placement force the next. A good order of attack:

1. Start with the extremes. A one-cell region marked 0 or 6 has exactly one possible value. A two-cell region that must sum to 12 needs 6 and 6; one that must sum to 0 needs two blanks. These pin dominoes down immediately.
2. Read the tray. If only one domino in the tray has a 6, any cell that must be 6 tells you exactly which domino goes there — and where its other half lands.
3. Use "=" regions to count. A three-cell "=" region needs three halves with the same value. Count how many halves of each value the tray actually has; often only one value is possible.
4. Use "≠" regions to rule out doubles. A double (like 3–3) can never sit with both halves in the same "≠" region.
5. Bound the inequalities. "< 3" on a single cell means 0, 1 or 2. Combine that with what is left in the tray before guessing.
6. Watch the shape. Cells in corners and narrow corridors can only be covered one way. If a cell has a single free neighbour, the domino covering it must also cover that neighbour.
7. Save plain regions for last. Unlabeled cells absorb whatever dominoes are left, so fill them once everything else is fixed.

Using the hints on HintPuzzle

Our daily Pips page gives you one placed domino per board as a starting point — Easy, Medium and Hard each have their own tile — and keeps the full solved boards face-down until you hold the answer tile. Try one hint, go back to the board, and only flip the answer if you are truly stuck.