What makes a pips puzzle hard?

Not size alone. A board becomes hard when its regions are loosely constrained — comparisons and unconstrained regions rather than exact sums — because loose rules give you nothing to calculate from and force you to reason by elimination instead.

Is the hard difficulty always harder than medium?

On average, yes: hard boards are 20 squares against medium’s 14, with more of their regions deliberately left loose. But an unlucky medium board can beat a friendly hard one, because the generator tunes toward a difficulty band rather than a fixed score.

How do I get better at hard pips boards?

Volume at a fixed difficulty. Play a month of hard boards in sequence rather than one a day — around the tenth you stop solving each from scratch and start recognising region shapes, which is the actual skill.

Hardest Pips Puzzles

The hardest pips puzzles are rarely the biggest ones. What actually breaks people is a board that refuses to give them anything to calculate — and once you know what that looks like, you can spot it before you waste twenty minutes on it.

By Sukie · Puzzle editor

Published October 2, 2025 · Updated July 31, 2026

Three things that make a board brutal

1. Loose constraints everywhere

An exact sum is a gift. = 12 across two squares has exactly one filling. Replace it with > 3 and suddenly nine combinations qualify. A board where most regions are comparisons or unconstrained gives you no arithmetic foothold at all — you have to reason about where tiles cannot go, which is slower and much easier to get wrong.

2. Regions that share too many tiles

When regions are shaped so most dominoes straddle a boundary, no region can be solved in isolation. Every placement is simultaneously a commitment in two places. This is the single biggest difference between a hard board and an easy one of the same size, and it is why hard boards punish solving region-by-region.

3. Doubles with nowhere to go

A double carries the same value twice, so it can never sit entirely inside an all-different region. Deal a board two or three doubles alongside a large ≠ region and their positions become nearly forced — which is either the key that unlocks the board or, if you miss it, the thing that makes it feel impossible.

The loosest hard boards of the last six weeks

Ranked by the share of regions left loosely constrained — measured from the boards themselves, not chosen by hand. These are the ones most likely to give you trouble.

How to attack one anyway

Place the doubles first. They are the most constrained tiles in your tray. Work out where they cannot go before deciding anything else.
Find the one tight region — even a loose board usually has a single exact sum. That is your only free information; spend it carefully.
Think in boundaries, not regions. Ask which pairs of regions are forced to share tiles, and what each pair permits jointly.
Watch for orphan squares. A single empty square with no empty neighbour is unrecoverable. Scan for it after every few placements rather than discovering it at the end.
Walk away and come back. Progress is saved per board, so a hard puzzle you abandon today is waiting exactly as you left it. Fresh eyes beat brute force on these.

Questions

What makes a pips puzzle hard?: Not size alone. A board becomes hard when its regions are loosely constrained — comparisons and unconstrained regions rather than exact sums — because loose rules give you nothing to calculate from and force you to reason by elimination instead.
Is the hard difficulty always harder than medium?: On average, yes: hard boards are 20 squares against medium’s 14, with more of their regions deliberately left loose. But an unlucky medium board can beat a friendly hard one, because the generator tunes toward a difficulty band rather than a fixed score.
How do I get better at hard pips boards?: Volume at a fixed difficulty. Play a month of hard boards in sequence rather than one a day — around the tenth you stop solving each from scratch and start recognising region shapes, which is the actual skill.