Games like pips are easier to recommend once you work out which half of pips you actually liked. It is two puzzles wearing one coat: an arithmetic problem about satisfying regions, and a packing problem about covering a grid with tiles. Almost every relative below inherits one of those and drops the other.
So this is not a ranked list. It is six puzzles, what each one shares with pips, where each one diverges, and who should try it. If you already know which half you came for, skip to the one that matches.
Worth being precise before comparing, because “domino puzzle” covers a lot of unrelated ground. A pips board is a grid divided into regions; a tray of dominoes must cover every square; and each region carries a badge its pip values have to satisfy. Four badge families do all the work.
Measured across the 1,143 boards published here, the mix is lopsided: exact sums account for 54% of regions, all-different for 22%, the two comparison badges for 19% between them, and all-equal for only 5%. So a typical board is mostly arithmetic with a strong seasoning of elimination — which is exactly why Killer Sudoku feels so familiar and Suguru feels like only half the game.
Six that come close
1.Killer Sudoku
A sudoku grid overlaid with dotted cages, each carrying a sum its digits must reach without repeating.
Shares with pips
This is the closest relative pips has. A cage is a region, its number is an exact sum, and the no-repeat condition inside a cage is precisely the ≠ rule. If you enjoyed working out that a three-square region totalling six must be 1+2+3, you already play Killer Sudoku.
Where it diverges
The sudoku scaffolding underneath — every row, column and box holding one of each digit — does a lot of the deductive work for you. Pips has no such scaffolding, so a region can be locally satisfied and still be wrong, which almost never happens in a Killer grid.
Try it if
Try it if you liked the arithmetic and want more of it, with more structure to lean on.
2.KenKen (Calcudoku)
A Latin square split into cages, each cage carrying a target and an operation — 12×, 3−, 24+.
Shares with pips
The cage-with-a-target idea again, but generalised past addition. Working out which factor pairs can produce 12 in two cells is the same species of reasoning as fitting a pip sum.
Where it diverges
Multiplication and division change the texture completely. Sums grow smoothly and let you reason in ranges; products jump, so KenKen rewards knowing factorisations cold rather than estimating. It is arithmetic drill in a way pips deliberately is not.
Try it if
Try it if you want the constraint-fitting to be harder and do not mind it being more mathematical.
3.Kakuro
A crossword shape where every across and down run has a clue number the digits must sum to, with no repeats in a run.
Shares with pips
Sum-constrained groups with a no-repeat rule, and — crucially — overlapping groups. A cell sits in one across run and one down run at once, which is exactly the pressure a pips domino feels when it straddles two regions.
Where it diverges
Kakuro is entirely arithmetic; there are no tiles and nothing to physically place. You are choosing digits, not fitting shapes. That removes the packing problem that makes pips feel tactile.
Try it if
Try it if the part you enjoyed was regions fighting over shared cells.
4.Dominosa
A grid of loose numbers that has to be partitioned into a complete domino set, each tile used exactly once.
Shares with pips
Actual dominoes, and the same covering constraint: every cell used once, every tile used once, no leftovers. The endgame feel — hunting for the square that has been orphaned with no partner — is identical.
Where it diverges
It runs the opposite way round. In Dominosa the numbers are given and you draw the tile boundaries; in pips the boundaries are given and you supply the numbers. There are also no region rules at all, so the whole "satisfy a badge" layer is missing.
Try it if
Try it if you liked the dominoes themselves more than the arithmetic.
5.Suguru (Tectonic)
Irregular regions of n cells, each filled with the numbers 1 to n, and no two touching cells — even diagonally — may match.
Shares with pips
Irregular regions with an all-different rule inside them. If the ≠ badge was your favourite part of a pips board, this is a puzzle built entirely out of it.
Where it diverges
No sums anywhere, and the adjacency rule reaches diagonally, which pips never does. It is a pure elimination puzzle — closer to how a hard pips board feels than to how a typical one plays.
Try it if
Try it if you found the exact sums a chore and preferred reasoning by what cannot go where.
6.Nurikabe and Shikaku
Region-drawing puzzles: divide a grid into areas of a given size around numbered anchors.
Shares with pips
The spatial half of pips — partitioning a grid so every cell belongs somewhere and nothing is stranded.
Where it diverges
There are no values to satisfy, only shapes to get right. Think of them as pips with the arithmetic removed and the geometry doubled.
Try it if
Try it if the satisfying bit was the packing, not the numbers.
Three that get recommended and should not be
Search results for this question are full of lists that pad themselves out with anything involving a grid. Three that keep appearing, and why each is a bad substitute.
Plain sudoku. It shares the grid and the regions and almost nothing else. Sudoku has no arithmetic, no tiles and no packing; its single rule is that a symbol may not repeat in a line or box. If pips appealed to you because of the sums, sudoku will feel empty — go to Killer Sudoku instead, which is the version that actually has the mechanic.
Traditional domino games. Fives-and-threes, block, draw, Mexican train — these involve the same physical objects and are not puzzles at all. They are turn-based games of chance and position against an opponent, with hidden information and luck of the draw. The dominoes are the only thing they share with pips, and dominoes are the least interesting part of pips.
Nonograms (Picross). Frequently listed because it is a beloved logic puzzle with numbers around a grid, but the numbers are run-length clues, not values you place or sum. You are deducing which cells are filled, not what goes in them. Excellent puzzle; completely different reasoning.
The test worth applying to any recommendation: does it have values you choose and groups those values must satisfy? If not, whatever else it has in common is cosmetic.
If what you wanted was the daily habit
There is a second reason people look for games like pips, and it has nothing to do with mechanics. Sometimes the appeal was never the dominoes — it was one puzzle a day, finishable in ten minutes, the same one everybody else is doing.
If that is the itch, the mechanic barely matters and you should ignore this entire page's comparison logic. Any well-made daily will do: a word game, a geography game, a chess puzzle. The thing you are buying is the shape of the ritual, not the genre, and swapping to a puzzle type you have never tried is usually more satisfying than finding a near-clone of the one you already know.
The one thing worth checking before you commit to a daily is whether it has a back catalogue. A daily puzzle with no archive punishes you for missing a day, and most people miss days. That gap is the reason this site exists at all — the pips archive runs 381 dates deep precisely so a missed Tuesday is not gone.
A note on where these come from
Most of the puzzles above are older than they look. Kakuro ran in American magazines as “cross sums” decades before it was renamed in Japan; sudoku itself descends from a 1979 American puzzle called Number Place, was popularised by the Japanese publisher Nikoli, and only reached global newspapers in 2004 — a history Britannica sets out in detail. KenKen was devised by a Japanese mathematics teacher, Tetsuya Miyamoto, as a classroom tool rather than a commercial puzzle.
The pattern is consistent and it is a useful thing to know as a player: nearly every durable logic puzzle is a small, sharp constraint idea that someone spent years tightening. Pips is a recent entry in a very long tradition, and its particular contribution is making the constraint physical — you are not choosing a digit, you are placing an object that has to fit.
A rough order to try them in
If you want a path rather than a menu: start with Killer Sudoku, because it is the closest relative and the easiest to find well-made examples of. If the cages felt good but the sudoku scaffolding felt like training wheels, go to Kakuro next — it removes the scaffolding and keeps the overlapping groups.
If instead the arithmetic was the chore, jump straight to Suguru, which keeps the irregular regions and the all-different reasoning and drops the sums entirely. And if what you actually missed was handling tiles, Dominosa is the only one on the list that gives you real dominoes back.
KenKen is worth saving for last. It is excellent, but the multiplication cages make it the least similar of the close relatives, and coming to it directly from pips tends to feel like a different hobby rather than an adjacent one.
What none of them replace
Worth saying plainly at the end of a page recommending alternatives: every puzzle above is a good puzzle, and none of them is pips. The specific pleasure of this format is that a domino is a physical object with two ends, so satisfying one region commits you in another whether you meant it or not. Kakuro has the overlap without the object; Dominosa has the object without the constraint. Only pips has both at once, which is why the search that brought you here exists in the first place.
Where to go from here
If it turns out the answer is “actually I just want more pips”, that is the easiest problem on this page to solve. There is a fresh board waiting on the unlimited page, 381 dated ones in the archive, and today's puzzle on the front page. If you want to get better at the ones you already have rather than play more of them, the strategy page is the more useful stop.
