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Pips

How to Play Pips

How to play pips, in the order you actually need it: what you are looking at, what the badges are telling you, where to put the first domino, and what to do when a region goes red. If you want the rules stated formally rather than demonstrated, the pips rules page does that instead.

Sukie, Puzzle editor at EnergyPips

By Sukie · Puzzle editor

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Step 1 — Read the board first

Before touching a tile, spend fifteen seconds on two questions: how many squares are there, and which region is the most restrictive? The square count tells you how many dominoes you have (always exactly half), and the tightest region tells you where the puzzle will actually be decided.

New players almost always start at the top-left corner because that is where reading starts. It is usually the worst square on the board — an unconstrained corner tells you nothing, so anything you place there is a guess you will have to unwind.

Step 2 — Find the region with the fewest legal fillings

Not the smallest region — the most constrained one. The quick test for an exact-sum region is to divide the target by the number of squares:

Step 3 — Place the first domino, then immediately look next door

Tap a domino in the tray to select it, use Rotate (or press R) to choose which direction its second half will extend, then tap a square. The tile lands with its first half on the square you tapped.

The important habit starts here: after every placement, check the region the other half landed in. A tile that perfectly satisfies the region you were thinking about will often quietly wreck its neighbour, and it is far cheaper to notice immediately than five tiles later.

Step 4 — Treat a red outline as information

A region outlined in red is currently impossible — either a value already breaks its rule, or the sum has overshot and cannot come back down. There is no penalty for this. It is feedback, and it is more useful early than late.

When it appears, undo rather than building around it. Press U, or tap any placed domino to lift it back to the tray. There is no move limit and no scoring penalty — the format is explicitly designed for experimentation.

Step 5 — Save the empty regions for last

Regions with no badge accept anything. That makes them tempting to fill first and wrong to fill first. They are the only place awkward tiles can go, so filling them early spends your flexibility on the part of the board that never needed it.

The mistake that stops most beginners

Almost everyone assumes a domino has to sit inside a single region. It does not. A domino covers two squares, those squares can belong to different regions, and each half is judged only against the region it lands in.

If a board looks impossible — the sums do not seem to work no matter what you try — this assumption is the reason nine times out of ten. Once you allow tiles to cross boundaries, boards that seemed broken open up immediately.

Questions

How long does a pips puzzle take?
An easy board takes two to four minutes once you know the rules. Medium runs five to ten. Hard boards vary enormously — ten minutes on a good day, and genuinely unsolved on a bad one until you come back to it later.
Which difficulty should a beginner start with?
Easy, and specifically several easy boards in a row rather than one before moving on. Easy boards use mostly exact-sum regions, which is where the arithmetic reasoning is most visible. Move up once you can finish one without lifting a tile.
What if I get stuck on a pips board?
Undo back to the last placement you were confident about rather than reshuffling everything. Most dead ends come from one early tile placed on a guess, and everything after it inherits the mistake.

Go and play one