Domino Pips

The blank

Seven tiles in the set carry a blank half — the 0-0 through the 0-6 — and a blank is worth exactly zero pips. That sounds too obvious to state, but it has consequences at both ends of a game. In a matching game the blank is a suit like any other: a line ending in a blank takes only a blank. In a scoring game it is the tile you most want to be left holding, because it costs you nothing when the round is counted.

Some house rules — a handful of Mexican Train tables, some family variants — treat a blank as wild, able to match any value. Treat that as a rule of the particular game, not a property of the tile; the standard descriptions of the game count it as zero, and so does every puzzle built on the set. In the Times' daily puzzle a blank half is simply 0, which is why a region badged with an exact sum of 0 is possible — and appears: the lowest sum target the Times has ever set is 0, on all three difficulties. A region asking for 0 is a region that must be filled entirely with blank halves.

Doubles and the spinner

A double is a tile whose halves match, and there are seven of them, one per value. Doubles are placed crosswise in most games — perpendicular to the line — and in many of them the first double laid becomes the spinner: tiles may be played off all four of its sides rather than only the two open ends. That single rule turns a line into a cross and quadruples the number of places the next tile can go, which is why the spinner is often the pivot of a scoring game's tactics.

Doubles matter differently in a puzzle. A double is the only tile that can sit inside an all-equal region on its own — both halves already agree — and it is the tile most often forced by a small exact sum, since a 1-1 is the only way to put two ones side by side from a single piece. The Times' constructors clearly know this: the average tray carries 1.32 doubles on an easy board, 1.78 on medium and 3.12 on hard, measured across all 413 published days. The doubles scale with the difficulty because they are load-bearing.

Reading pips at a glance

Nobody who plays regularly counts dots. The pips on a domino are arranged in the same patterns as the faces of a die — one in the centre; two and three on a diagonal; four in the corners; five as the four corners plus the centre; six as two columns of three — and the patterns exist precisely so that a value can be recognised by shape. The six is the one that trips new players, because it is the only pattern with an empty centre, and at speed an empty centre reads as “less” when it means the most.

The other thing worth learning to see is the pair. On a double-six set every tile has a complement whose two halves each make six with the original's: the complement of a 2-5 is a 4-1. A tile and its complement always total twelve pips between them. It is not a rule of any game — it is just arithmetic — but once you see hands in complementary pairs, the pip count of a hand of seven becomes a quick subtraction rather than a sum, and in a blocked round that is the number that decides the winner.

What the pips do in a puzzle tray

A domino puzzle takes the set and removes the opponent. The Times' daily puzzle, and the free daily board on this site, both hand you a tray of tiles drawn from the double-six set — never more than one of each — and a grid of coloured regions, each badged with a rule about the pips that will end up inside it. The exact-sum badge is pip counting, plain and simple: the halves lying inside the region must add to the number shown. The all-equal badge is a suit constraint. The ≠ badge is the opposite. So every rule on the board is a rule about pips, which is why the puzzle carries the name it does.

The trays are small compared to a full set. Measured across every board the Times has published, an easy tray averages about 5 dominoes, a medium about 7, and a hard about 13 — the whole set is 28, so even the largest board uses roughly half of it. That is deliberate. With seven values and a small tray, exact sums stay small: the commonest sum target across all 1,239 published boards is 4, and the median is 4. The pips are being used for logic, not arithmetic.

The one rule that carries over from the table and catches puzzle players every day is that a domino can lie across a region boundary. Its two halves then count separately — one half of pips into one region, the other half into the next — and the tile as a whole is in neither. The rules page walks that through square by square, and the NYT-specific guide covers how the three difficulties use it. To see the pips in action on a real board, the answers archive explains every published solution, and today's free board is here to play.

Common questions

How many pips are on a full set of dominoes?

A standard double-six set carries 168 pips across its 28 tiles. Each value from 0 to 6 appears on eight tile-halves, and 8 × (0+1+2+3+4+5+6) = 168. Larger sets follow the same pattern: 495 pips on a double-nine, 1,092 on a double-twelve.

What is a blank domino worth?

Zero pips, in almost every game and in the Times’ puzzle. A few house variants treat a blank as wild — able to match any value — but that is a rule of the particular game, not a property of the tile. When counting a hand or a region, a blank half contributes nothing.

What is the spinner in dominoes?

In many matching games the first double laid on the table becomes the spinner: tiles may be played off all four of its sides rather than the usual two ends. Which doubles act as spinners, and whether all of them do, depends on the game being played.

Why do the pips on a six look like two columns?

Domino pips use the same arrangements as dice faces: one in the centre, two and three on a diagonal, four in the corners, five as corners plus centre, and six as two columns of three. The patterns exist so a value can be read by shape rather than counted dot by dot.