Pips Practice
Pips practice is for the repetitions. Pick one difficulty, work it until the region shapes start looking familiar, and come back to the daily board sharper than you left it. Every board below is generated on the spot and verified solvable before it reaches you.
By Sukie · Puzzle editor
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This hour's practice set
These notes are generated from the three boards above — they change when the boards do, so what you read here describes exactly what you are looking at:
easy
The easy board has 8 squares, 4 dominoes and 4 regions — 2 exact-sum and 2 all-different regions. Start with the "= 3" region. It spreads 3 pips across 2 squares, averaging 1.5 per square, so the halves that can legally sit there are limited before you have placed anything at all.
medium
The medium board has 14 squares, 7 dominoes and 6 regions — 3 exact-sum, 2 less-than and 1 all-different regions. Start with the "= 0" region. It spreads 0 pips across 1 square, averaging 0.0 per square, so the halves that can legally sit there are limited before you have placed anything at all.
hard
The hard board has 20 squares, 10 dominoes and 7 regions — 4 exact-sum, 2 less-than and 1 all-different regions. Start with the "= 2" region. It spreads 2 pips across 2 squares, averaging 1.0 per square, so the halves that can legally sit there are limited before you have placed anything at all.
Practice mode versus the dated archive
These two things look similar and are useful for opposite reasons. Practice boards are disposable: they exist for this page load, they have no permanent URL, and you cannot come back to one. That makes them ideal for drilling — if a board goes badly, reload and forget it.
Archive boards are the opposite. Each has a fixed URL, never changes, and can be shared or replayed months later. If you want to compare your time against a friend's on the same board, or return to something you failed, use the pips archive rather than practice mode.
A pattern that works well: drill here until a difficulty stops feeling random, then go to the archive and run a full month at that level to confirm it stuck.
How to actually use practice mode
Unlimited puzzles are only an advantage if you drill deliberately. Reloading until you get a board that feels comfortable is the opposite of practice. Three routines that produce measurable improvement:
The five-in-a-row
Play five boards at one difficulty without switching. Switching after a hard board feels good and teaches nothing — the value is in meeting the same class of problem repeatedly until the region shapes start looking familiar rather than novel.
The no-undo run
Play an easy board with a self-imposed rule: no undos. You will place far more slowly, because every tile now has to be justified before it goes down. That is the entire point — it forces the check-the-neighbouring-region habit that separates two-minute boards from ten-minute ones.
The elimination drill
Before placing anything on a medium board, pick one square and work out which tiles in your tray cannot legally go there. Do it for three squares. This is slow and unnatural at first, and it is the exact mental motion hard boards demand once exact sums stop being available.
Where these boards come from
Practice boards run through the same generator as the dated archive. A valid arrangement of dominoes is laid down first, the squares are then divided into regions, and each region's rule is derived from the values that already landed inside it. Because the solution exists before the constraints do, a practice board can never be unsolvable.
The rules are then loosened one at a time — an exact total swapped for a ≠, a < 4, or nothing at all — with each swap kept only while the number of valid arrangements stays inside the bound for that difficulty. That relaxation count is what actually separates easy from hard, more than the square count does.
The one difference from the archive is permanence. Practice boards are seeded fresh rather than from a date, so they exist for this page load only and have no shareable URL. If you hit one you want to keep, finish it now — reloading will not bring it back.
How long should a board take?
Rough guidance, for calibration rather than as a target. There is no timer pressure here and no penalty for going slowly:
| Difficulty | Learning | Comfortable |
|---|---|---|
| Easy · 8 squares | 5–10 min | 2–4 min |
| Medium · 14 squares | 15–25 min | 5–10 min |
| Hard · 20 squares | often unfinished | 10–25 min |
If an easy board is regularly taking you fifteen minutes, the issue is almost never arithmetic — it is starting in the wrong place. Read the solving order in the rules and try again; the fix is usually immediate.
What to actually watch while you drill
Reps without a target mostly consolidate existing habits, including the bad ones — deliberate practice means attending to one measurable thing at a time. Each of these is a single measurable thing to attend to for a session; pick one and ignore the others while you do:
- Undo count, not time. The timer measures typing speed as much as thinking. Undos measure premature commitments, which is the actual skill gap. A ten-minute board with zero undos beats a four-minute board with nine.
- First-placement quality. After each board, ask one question: was my first tile in the tightest region, or the nearest one? A week of honest answers to that fixes openings permanently.
- Red-region latency. How many placements passed between breaking a region and noticing? The answer should trend toward zero — the check-the-neighbour habit is what closes it.
- Doubles discipline. Did every double get placed in the first half of the solve? Doubles left for last are the most common cause of late-board dead ends.
A weekly structure, if you want one
Practice mode plus the dated archive make a complete training loop. A structure that works, at roughly fifteen minutes a day: drill here on two or three boards at your current level early in the week, focusing on one habit at a time — the tightest-region scan, the doubles-first pass, the orphan check. Mid-week, take the daily board as your test: it is the same generator, but you have not warmed up on it, so it tells you what actually stuck. At the weekend, go to the archive and replay whichever boards beat you during the week. Failure plus a two-day gap plus a second attempt is where the learning happens; everything else is repetitions.
Move up a difficulty when the current one stops producing failures — not when you get one clean solve, which is often the tray being kind. Two consecutive no-undo solves is a better promotion bar, and it is deliberately strict: medium punishes easy's bad habits far more than easy ever did.
Practice questions
- Why did the boards change when I reloaded?
- Practice boards are seeded from the current hour, not the date, so a reload within the same hour returns the same set and a later visit returns a fresh one. That is the intended trade: endless variety here, permanence in the archive. If you need a board you can return to or share, play a dated one instead.
- Does practice progress save like archive progress?
- Within the hour, yes — your placements persist through a reload the same way archive progress does. Once the hourly set rotates, the old board no longer exists to restore into, so treat practice solves as disposable by design.
- Is there any limit on how many I can play?
- No limit, no account, no cooldown. The generator produces boards on demand and verifies each one solvable before serving it; play forty in a sitting if you like. The only practical constraint is the hourly rotation described above.
- Which difficulty should I practise at?
- The one where you fail sometimes. If you are solving every board first time without an undo, you are rehearsing rather than training and should move up. If you are failing more often than you finish, drop down — a board you cannot finish teaches you nothing about which habit went wrong.
- How long should a practice session be?
- Two or three boards, fifteen minutes or so. Pattern recognition forms through repeated short exposures far better than through one long sitting, and the boards are free tomorrow too.
- Is practice mode easier than the daily puzzle?
- No. Same generator, same difficulty calibration, same solvability verification. A practice hard board and a dated hard board are drawn from identical specifications — the only difference is that one has a date attached and the other does not.
Related
What to work on, in order
Undirected repetition is how most people plateau. Practising a specific habit until it is automatic, then moving to the next, is considerably faster — and there are only about four habits that matter.
First, the bounding pass. Before touching a tile, work out the minimum and maximum every exact-sum region could hold. On a two-square region the range is 0 to 12, so a target of 11 has exactly one filling. Practise this until you do it without deciding to.
Second, the doubles pass. Find every double in the tray and work out where it cannot go. Doubles are barred from all-different regions entirely and are the only tile that fits wholly inside an all-equal one, so they are the most constrained thing you hold.
Third, the orphan check. Every few placements, scan for an empty square with no empty neighbour. It can never be covered, so it is proof of an earlier mistake — and catching it two moves later instead of ten is most of the difference between a frustrating board and a fast one.
Fourth, boundary thinking. When you consider a placement, ask what it commits in the neighbouring region, not just in the one you are trying to satisfy. This is the last one to become automatic and the one that makes hard boards tractable.
Work them in that order, one per session, and give each a week before adding the next. Trying to hold all four at once is how people end up doing none of them properly.