About EnergyPips
EnergyPips is a one-person site that publishes a free daily pips puzzle and keeps every past board playable. This page explains who makes it, how the puzzles are produced, and how the site pays for itself.
By Sukie · Puzzle editor
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Sukie
Puzzle editor
I build and edit the daily puzzle here. I'm not a mathematician — I'm someone who got hooked on daily logic games, got frustrated that the good ones lock their back catalogue behind a subscription, and decided to build an archive that doesn't.
Why this site exists
I got into daily logic puzzles the way most people do — one game, every morning, as a habit. What eventually annoyed me was not the puzzles. It was that the back catalogue kept disappearing. Miss a few days and they were gone, or they came back only behind a subscription.
That is a perfectly rational way to run a puzzle business, and it is a bad way to actually get better at one. Improving takes repetition at a fixed difficulty, and you cannot get repetition from one board a day. So this site does the opposite: the archive is open, all of it, and it always will be.
Where the puzzles come from
Every board here is generated by software I wrote, and none of it is copied from anywhere. The generator builds a valid domino layout first, then adds region constraints on top of it, which means a solution is guaranteed to exist before the puzzle is ever published. Each board is then re-verified against its own rules and checked to make sure it is not so loosely constrained that you could solve it by dropping tiles at random.
Boards are deterministic: a given date always produces the same puzzle, on every device, permanently. That is what makes a shared archive link mean something.
What this site is not
EnergyPips is not affiliated with The New York Times, and it does not host or reproduce NYT Pips puzzles. The format is shared — dominoes into constrained regions — because game mechanics are not something anyone owns, in the same way that many sites publish sudoku without any of them owning sudoku. The specific boards are ours.
If you are looking for the official NYT archive specifically, the NYT pips archive page explains what that is and how it differs from this one, honestly.
How the site makes money
Advertising, and nothing else. There is no subscription, no paid tier and no premium archive. There are no affiliate links on the site. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it ships, not after.
Corrections
If a board looks unsolvable, a rule is described wrongly, or anything else here is incorrect, tell me and I will fix it — a genuinely broken board is the most serious bug this site can have. Use the contact page and include the date and difficulty.