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Pips

Past Pips Games

Past pips games are all here and all free — 392 days of them, going back to August 18, 2025. Whether you want yesterday's board, a specific date you missed, or a whole month to work through, this page is the route in.

Sukie, Puzzle editor at EnergyPips

By Sukie · Puzzle editor

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Pips previous days

The last two weeks, newest first. Most people arriving here want yesterday.

A better order than “random old puzzle”

Having the whole back catalogue open is only an advantage if you use it deliberately. Clicking random dates feels productive and teaches you very little. Three routes that work better:

If you are still learning the rules

Play easy boards from consecutive days — five or six in a row. Consecutive days give you varied region shapes at a constant difficulty, which is exactly the contrast you need while the badges are still unfamiliar.

If easy has stopped being interesting

Take one date and run all three difficulties on it. They are separate boards, not the same board with hints removed, so you get a genuine step up rather than a second look at a solution you already know.

If you want to actually get good

Pick a month and play every hard board in it. Around board ten you stop solving each one from scratch and start recognising region shapes — that transition is the whole point, and it does not happen at one puzzle a day.

Old pips puzzles by month

Every month since the archive opened. Pick one and work through it.

What replaying an old board teaches that a new one cannot

There is a specific reason the archive is more useful than a stream of fresh puzzles, and it is not nostalgia. When you play a new board, you cannot tell the difference between having reasoned correctly and having guessed lucky — both feel identical from the inside, and both end with a solved board.

Replaying a board you previously failed removes that ambiguity. You already know the board is solvable; the only question is whether the technique you thought you learned actually transfers. If you stall in the same place twice, that is not bad luck, it is a gap — and it is nearly always the same gap: not checking the region a tile spilled into before building on it.

Two days is roughly the right gap. Same day and you are recalling the solution rather than re-deriving it. Two weeks and you have lost whatever you were trying to consolidate.

What changes as you move through the archive

The boards are not tuned to get harder over time — a board from last August is calibrated exactly like this morning's. What changes is you, and it changes in a fairly predictable order:

Boards 1–5: reading the badges

Most of the effort goes into remembering what each symbol demands. Expect to re-read the rules mid-board. This is normal and it passes quickly.

Boards 5–15: the boundary realisation

Somewhere in here it clicks that a domino can straddle two regions and that each half answers only to its own. Boards that felt impossible stop feeling impossible. This is the single biggest jump in the whole progression.

Boards 15–40: starting in the right place

You stop opening at the top-left corner and start scanning for the tightest region first. Solve times drop sharply, mostly because you undo less.

Boards 40+: shape recognition

You begin recognising region shapes and knowing roughly what fits before calculating. This is where hard boards become genuinely enjoyable rather than gruelling, and it only comes from volume at a fixed difficulty — which is exactly what a one-a-day drip cannot provide and an open archive can.

Streaks are the wrong metric for an open archive

Daily puzzle culture runs on streaks, and streaks make sense when yesterday disappears: the only way to have played every board is to have shown up every day. An open archive of domino boards breaks that logic on purpose. Miss a week here and the week waits for you; there is nothing to protect and nothing to lose at midnight.

What replaces the streak is a better metric: coverage at a difficulty. “I have cleared every hard board in June” says something real about your solving that “I opened the site 40 days running” never did — the first measures skill, the second measures habit. If you want a number to chase, chase a month.

The practical upside is psychological. Streak pressure pushes people to play tired, guess their way through, and resent the puzzle by week six. Coverage lets a hard board sit unfinished overnight — which, as the hardest-boards page argues, is usually the fastest way to actually solve it.

Finding a specific board you remember

A surprising number of people arrive at an archive hunting one particular puzzle — “the one from the last week of April”, “the one with the huge all-different region”. Some retrieval tactics that work here:

  • If you know the rough date, use the month sections above and step through with the ← and → links on each puzzle page — they walk the archive day by day without returning to the index.
  • If you remember the weekday, every card in the archive lists it. “A Saturday in May” narrows 31 candidates to five.
  • If you remember a structural quirk — an unusually loose board, say — the hardest pips puzzles page ranks recent hard boards by exactly that measure, computed from the boards themselves.
  • If you played it here, your browser still holds the evidence: revisit a date you think you played and your placements will be restored, unfinished or solved. A solved board you do not remember solving is usually the one you were looking for.

And a note for the future: every URL on this site is permanent. If you land on a board you will want again — for a rematch against a friend, or as a teaching example — the address bar is the bookmark. Nothing rotates out.

Questions about past pips games

Can I play previous pips games?
Yes. Every past board on this site stays playable permanently, at every difficulty, with no subscription and no account.
How do I play yesterday’s pips puzzle?
Open the archive and pick yesterday’s date, or use the ← arrow at the bottom of today’s puzzle page to step back one day at a time.
Are old pips puzzles easier than new ones?
No. Difficulty is set by the generator per board, not by age, so an easy board from last August is calibrated the same way as an easy board from this morning.
Does my progress on an old puzzle save?
Yes. Placements and the timer save automatically in your browser, per date and per difficulty. Leave a board half-finished, come back next month, and it will be exactly as you left it. Clearing browser data clears saved progress, and progress does not transfer between devices.
Can I play past pips games on my phone?
Yes. Every archive board plays on mobile with tap-to-place controls — tap a domino, tap a square, and use the Rotate button to set direction. The board scales to the screen, and nothing about the archive requires a desktop.
Do old pips puzzles ever get removed?
No. Nothing is ever deleted from the archive. A board you played months ago is still at the same URL.

Why most pips sites don't keep their past games

It is worth understanding why this page needs to exist at all. Daily puzzle publishers have a strong commercial reason to make yesterday disappear: scarcity is the conversion mechanic. If you can always come back tomorrow for free, the daily habit costs nothing; if missing a day means losing that board forever — or paying to retrieve it — the habit converts into a subscription. The archive is not missing from those sites by accident. It is the product being withheld.

This site runs the opposite model. The archive is open because the archive is the point: ad-supported, no account, nothing withheld. Every board since August 18, 2025 is a permanent URL that will load the same puzzle next month and next year. That permanence is also why boards here are generated deterministically from their date — a shared archive link has to mean the same thing for everyone who opens it, forever.

The honest trade-off: these are our boards, not anyone else's back catalogue. If you came looking for a specific publisher's past puzzles, the NYT pips archive page explains exactly what that archive is, what it costs, and how this one differs — without pretending to be it.

Keep playing

Why the archive opens on 18 August 2025

The run has to start somewhere, and that date is not arbitrary. It is roughly when the daily-pips format went from a curiosity to something a lot of people were playing every morning — which is also when people started looking for the day they missed and finding nothing.

Starting there rather than at some launch date of our own means the archive covers the whole period anyone is likely to be looking back at. Nothing has been removed since, and nothing will be: a board that existed last March still exists, at the same URL, with the same three difficulties.

One thing that follows and is worth being explicit about — these are our boards, not reproductions of anyone else's puzzle from that date. Same format and same rule vocabulary, generated here. If you want the reasoning behind that, the page on whether an official archive exists covers it properly.