Printable Pips Puzzles

Why a printed board is a different puzzle

On screen, a wrong placement costs nothing — you drag the tile back and the board forgets. On paper it costs an eraser and a smudge, and that changes how people play almost immediately. Printed solvers check before committing. Screen solvers try things.

Neither is better, but the printed version is much closer to how the puzzle actually rewards you. The habit worth building — bound the sum regions, place the doubles, only then touch a comparison — is a habit that paper enforces and a screen lets you skip. If you have plateaued on the daily board, a week on paper is a surprisingly effective way to break the guess-and-undo loop.

It also removes the timer pressure that a screen quietly creates, which matters if you are handing these to a child or using them somewhere a device is awkward.

What is on the sheet

Six boards: two easy, two medium, two hard. That mix is deliberate rather than arbitrary — it is roughly one sitting for most people, and it front-loads the two sizes that teach the format fastest.

The sizes are fixed by difficulty and measured across this site's whole archive: easy boards average 8 squares across 3.7 regions, medium 14 across 5.6, and hard 20 across 6.8. A hard board also carries about 3.31 doubles in its tray against an easy board's 1.24, which is the real reason it takes longer — more tiles with fewer legal homes, not simply more squares.

Every badge on these sheets comes from the same generator as the dated archive boards, so nothing about a printed puzzle is easier or looser than the ones played on screen.

Printing notes

• Black and white is fine. Regions are drawn with heavy borders rather than colour fills, so nothing is lost in greyscale — and nothing is wasted in toner.
• Portrait, default margins. Each board is sized to sit comfortably on A4 and US Letter without scaling.
• Turn off “headers and footers” in the print dialog if you would rather not have the URL and date printed down the edge.
• Save as PDF from the same dialog if you want to keep or send a set — that produces a cleaner file than any download button would.

Using these with children

The easy boards are eight squares and four tiles, and the only arithmetic they require is adding two or three single digits. That puts them within reach of most seven- or eight-year-olds, which is younger than the screen version tends to attract — partly because a printed board has no undo button and therefore no way to brute-force it.

Two adjustments help a lot with younger solvers. First, cut the tray up. Printing a second copy and scissoring the tiles into loose rectangles turns the puzzle into a physical fitting problem, which is much easier to reason about than writing numbers into squares. Second, start with a board where the badges are all exact sums and skip the comparison ones — a > 4 asks a child to hold an inequality in their head while also placing a tile, and that is a genuinely different cognitive load from adding to a target.

For a classroom the useful property is that every sheet is different. Print six copies and everyone gets the same six puzzles, so you can work one on a whiteboard; come back next week and the whole set has rotated, so nobody is re-solving from memory.

Why there is no download button

Most printable-puzzle sites put a PDF behind a button, and often behind an email address. There is no button here on purpose. Your browser's own print dialog already produces a better PDF than a pre-generated file would — it uses your paper size, your margins and your printer's driver, rather than a fixed US Letter layout that clips on A4.

It also means there is no stale file. The boards you print are the boards this page is showing you, generated today, rather than a PDF that was rendered once in some past month and has been served unchanged ever since. And nothing asks for your email, because nothing needs it.

The one thing a print dialog does that you probably want to turn off is the browser's own header and footer — the URL and date it stamps down the edge of every sheet. It is a checkbox in the same dialog, usually under “More settings”.

Reading a printed badge

The screen version separates regions with colour, and colour is the first thing a printer takes away. These sheets replace it with line weight: a thin grey line is a square boundary, a heavy black line is a region boundary. Anywhere two regions meet, the line between them is thick.

That is worth thirty seconds of practice on the first sheet, because it changes how you scan. On screen you find a region by its colour and read its badge second. On paper you find the heavy outline first and trace it, which is slower at first and then faster — the outline tells you the region's exact shape, whereas a colour block on a small screen frequently does not.

Every badge sits in the top-left square of its own region, so if you are unsure which region a badge governs, follow the heavy border out from that square until it closes. There is exactly one badge per region and never more.

A small thing that helps on the hard sheets: pencil a light dot in each square as you commit it, rather than writing the number straight away. Committing a position and committing a value are two different decisions, and separating them on paper saves a lot of erasing.

Keeping a stack of them

A habit worth stealing from people who do crosswords on paper: print a week at a time rather than a sheet at a time. Six boards a day for seven days is forty-two puzzles, which is a fortnight or so of casual solving and about ten minutes at the printer.

The reason it works is that the friction of getting a puzzle disappears. A stack on the table gets picked up; a page you have to navigate to and print does not. It also puts the boards somewhere a screen is not welcome — a kitchen table, a train, the ten minutes before a meeting starts.

Because the set rotates daily, printing across seven days gives you forty-two different boards rather than the same six repeatedly. Date the corner of each sheet as it comes out of the printer if you want to be able to tell them apart later.

Paper is where this format started

Printing these out is less of a downgrade than it sounds. Dominoes reached Europe from China in the eighteenth century and were a table game long before they were a screen one — Britannica covers the history — and the double-six set has been fixed for most of that time.

What is genuinely new is the region badge. Traditional domino games score on the tiles in your hand; this format ignores scoring entirely and asks instead whether every area of the board satisfies a rule. That idea is a twentieth-century logic-puzzle invention grafted onto a much older object, and it works on paper for exactly the reason it works on a screen: nothing about it needs animation.

Questions about printing

How do I print these pips puzzles?

Press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac) anywhere on this page. A print stylesheet strips the header, footer and all the explanatory text, leaving one puzzle per sheet. There is no separate PDF to download and no email to hand over.

Do the printable puzzles work in black and white?

They are designed for it. The on-screen game uses colour to separate regions; these sheets use a heavy border wherever two regions meet instead, so a greyscale print is exactly as solvable as a colour one and uses almost no ink.

Where are the answers?

Deliberately not on the sheet — printed double-sided, an answer key lands on the back of the puzzle you are still solving. If you want a board with a verified solution diagram to check against, play a dated one from the archive instead: every archive page carries its answer behind a disclosure you choose to open.

Can I use these in a classroom?

Yes. Print as many as you like for teaching, a puzzle club, a waiting room or a care home. The boards are generated by this site rather than copied from a publisher, so there is nothing to clear with anyone.

Do the puzzles change?

A fresh set is generated each day, so bookmarking this page and returning next week gives you six new boards rather than the same six again.

Are printed boards guaranteed solvable?

Yes, on the same terms as every board here: the arrangement is built before the puzzle is, and the finished board is re-checked against every rule. The full stored archive — 1,143 boards — is re-verified on every deployment.