Pips February 6, 2026

Hints and answers for February 6, 2026

Stuck? Take it in stages. A nudge costs less than the full answer, and the answer is here if you want it — each diagram below is the verified solution our generator built this board from, using tiles drawn from the standard double-six domino set. On the looser boards other valid arrangements can exist too; any filling that covers every square and satisfies every region counts as solved.

What goes wrong on this one

The all-different region is the one to watch. With 4 squares in the widest region on this board, an all-different rule quietly forbids far more arrangements than it looks like it does.

The all-different region is the one to watch. With 4 squares in the widest region on this board, an all-different rule quietly forbids far more arrangements than it looks like it does.

If you have genuinely stalled, undo back to the last tile you were confident about rather than reshuffling everything. Most dead ends on a board this size trace to one early placement made on a guess, and everything after it inherits the mistake.

Board by board

The arithmetic check

Your tray carries 66 pips in total, and the exact-sum regions between them demand 35 across 9 squares. That leaves 31 pips to absorb elsewhere. Running that subtraction before you place anything tells you whether the unconstrained squares are going to be a dumping ground or a tight squeeze.

The same check on the medium board: your tray carries 45 pips in total, and the exact-sum regions between them demand 23 across 8 squares. That leaves 22 pips to absorb elsewhere. Running that subtraction before you place anything tells you whether the unconstrained squares are going to be a dumping ground or a tight squeeze.

The shape of the grid

This is a distinctly irregular outline, filling only 67% of its 6×5 bounding box. Narrow arms are the danger: a square at the end of a one-wide corridor has exactly one possible partner, so if that partner gets covered the board becomes unsolvable regardless of what else you do.

How the three boards differ

These are three separate boards, not one board with hints removed, so playing all three on February 6, 2026 gives you three genuine attempts rather than three views of the same solution.

easy

8 squares, 4 dominoes, 4 regions, 4 region boundaries. 50% of its regions carry something other than an exact total, and the widest region spans 4 squares.

medium

14 squares, 7 dominoes, 5 regions, 5 region boundaries. 40% of its regions carry something other than an exact total, and the widest region spans 4 squares.

hard

20 squares, 10 dominoes, 7 regions, 9 region boundaries. 57% of its regions carry something other than an exact total, and the widest region spans 4 squares.

The tiles you are dealt

The tray holds 3 doubles (5-5, 2-2, 4-4), and the board has 2 regions governed by an equality rule. A double can never sit entirely inside an all-different region, so those tiles have to straddle a boundary — which usually pins them down before anything else on the board.

The heaviest tile on the hard board is the 5-6 and the lightest is the 0-1. Those two are worth locating first: the heavy tile can only go where a sum has room, and the light one is often the only thing that fits a tight region.

How much the regions overlap

There are 9 distinct region-to-region boundaries on this board, which is a lot for 7 regions. Almost every tile you place is going to land half in one region and half in another, so treating regions as separate sub-puzzles will not work here — think in pairs.

A domino can straddle two regions, and each half only has to satisfy the region it lands in. That is the single most common misreading of the format — people assume a tile must sit inside one region, which makes perfectly solvable boards look impossible. The rules page works through it with examples.

Reading the constraints

The hard board uses 5 of the six possible region rules. What each one is actually demanding here:

< 2

Caps every individual value below 2, which rules out roughly 71% of the pip values outright. It says nothing about the total.

> 1

Requires every value above 1, leaving only 5 of the seven pip values legal in those 4 squares.

= 7

Spreads exactly 7 pips over 2 squares, an average of 3.5 each. Anything that pushes the running total past 7 is already lost, so this is the region to count before you commit.

≠

Forbids any repeat across its 2 squares. Note that this constrains values, not tiles — two different dominoes both contributing a 4 still breaks it.

=

Forces all 2 squares to show the same value. With distinct tiles in your tray, only a narrow set of combinations can supply that.

The full badge vocabulary, including the ones this board happens not to use, is on the pips rules page.