Free daily domino puzzle
Pips Game
Pips is a logic puzzle played with dominoes: a board is divided into coloured regions, each carrying a rule — an exact sum, all values equal, all different, or a less-than / greater-than bound — and you place every tile from your tray until each square is covered and every region is satisfied. Today is puzzle #371 (August 23, 2026), published in three difficulties.
Everything here is free, with no account: today's boards, a hints-and-answers section on every date, and a permanent archive of every previous day. If you are new, the sixty-second rules below the board are enough to start.
↓ Play today's puzzleThe pips game is a domino logic puzzle: cover every square on the board so that each coloured region satisfies its rule. This site publishes a fresh board every day in three difficulties, and keeps all 371 previous days playable in the pips archive — free, with no subscription.
By Sukie · Puzzle editor
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The rules in sixty seconds
- 1. Cover every square. Each domino covers exactly two squares that share an edge. You must use every tile in the tray, and every square must end up covered.
- 2. Satisfy every region. The badge in a region's corner is its rule. = 12 means the pips inside must total exactly twelve. = means every value in it must match. ≠ means no two may match. < 4 and > 2 bound each individual value. A region with no badge has no rule.
- 3. Halves are judged separately. A domino can lie across two regions. Each half answers only to the region it sits in — this is the mechanic that makes the format interesting rather than arithmetic.
Full detail, including how the rules interact and why the tightest region is almost always the right place to start, is on the pips rules page. If you have never played, the how to play pips walkthrough goes from empty grid to solved board one move at a time.
Why the archive is the point
Most daily puzzles are deliberately disposable. Miss a day and it is gone, or it reappears only behind a subscription — the scarcity is what converts casual players into paying ones. That is a reasonable business model and a frustrating experience, particularly if you are trying to actually improve rather than maintain a streak.
Improving at pips takes volume and repetition on the same difficulty, which a one-board-a-day drip cannot give you. So the archive here is open by default: all 371 days, all three difficulties, replayable as often as you want. Start with past pips games if you want a route through it, or jump straight to yesterday from there.
Reading a board before you touch it
The difference between finishing an easy board in two minutes and flailing at it for ten is almost entirely about where you start. New players begin at the top-left corner because that is where reading starts. It is usually the worst square on the board.
What you want instead is the most constrained region — the one with the fewest legal fillings. For an exact sum, divide the target by the number of squares it covers:
| Region | Average per square | Legal fillings |
|---|---|---|
| = 12 over 2 squares | 6.0 | Exactly one: 6 and 6 |
| = 1 over 2 squares | 0.5 | Two: 0+1 or 1+0 |
| = 6 over 2 squares | 3.0 | Seven, from 0+6 through 6+0 |
| > 4 over 3 squares | — | Only 5s and 6s qualify at all |
| no badge | — | Anything. Fill it last. |
Averages near 0 or near 6 are tight and give you free information. Averages near 3 are loose and tell you almost nothing. That single calculation, run across the board before your first placement, is the highest-value thirty seconds in the game.
Where the format gets its difficulty
If regions never touched, pips would be arithmetic homework — each region an independent little sum, solvable in isolation, no interaction. What makes it a puzzle is that a domino covers two squares and those squares can sit in different regions.
The consequence is that satisfying one region routinely breaks its neighbour, because the tile you needed had to put its other half somewhere. On the harder boards this is deliberate: regions are shaped so most tiles are forced to cross a boundary. Once a board starts resisting you, stop thinking about regions one at a time and start thinking about which pairs of regions are obliged to share tiles.
There is one more failure mode worth knowing before it costs you a board: the orphan square. A single empty square with no empty neighbour can never be covered, because dominoes need two adjacent squares. If you create one, no amount of clever placement elsewhere recovers it — undo immediately. Scan for orphans every few placements rather than discovering one at the end with two tiles left.
Where pips comes from, and the words worth knowing
“Pips” is the old word for the dots on dice, dominoes and playing cards — it predates every video game by centuries. Dominoes themselves go back to Song-dynasty China, arriving in Europe through eighteenth-century Italy (the history is well documented), and the double-six set this game deals from (28 unique tiles, 0-0 through 6-6) has been the standard western set for most of that time. The puzzle form is much younger: constraint puzzles built on domino placement circulated among puzzle constructors for decades, and the format had its mainstream moment in 2025 when The New York Times shipped a daily version and gave the genre its now-common name.
A short glossary, since the community reuses a few terms with precise meanings:
- Pip — one dot. A domino half carries 0 to 6 of them; the half's value is its pip count.
- Double — a tile with the same value on both halves (3-3, 5-5). The least flexible tiles in any tray, and usually the right ones to place first.
- Blank — a half with zero pips. Blanks are gold next to small exact sums, because they contribute nothing to a total.
- Region — a coloured group of squares sharing one rule. Regions, not rows or columns, are the unit of constraint in pips.
- Straddle — a domino lying across a region boundary, each half judged only by the region it sits in. The move the whole format turns on.
- Orphan — an empty square whose neighbours are all filled. Unrecoverable; the reason careful players scan the outline every few moves.
Common questions
- What is the pips game?
- Pips is a logic puzzle played with dominoes. A board is divided into coloured regions, each carrying a rule — an exact sum, all values equal, all values different, or a less-than / greater-than bound. You place every domino from your tray onto pairs of adjacent squares until the whole board is covered and every region satisfies its rule.
- Is the pips game free?
- Yes. Every board on this site, daily and archived, is free. There is no account, no subscription and no limit on how many you play.
- Can one domino cover two different regions?
- Yes, and this is the part most new players miss. A domino spans two squares, and those squares can belong to different regions. Each half only has to satisfy the region it lands in.
- Is there a time limit or a penalty for wrong moves?
- No. There is a timer if you want to race yourself, but nothing is lost by experimenting. Place tiles, lift them again, undo, reset — the format is built for trial and error.
- How many pips are on a domino?
- Each half of a domino carries between 0 and 6 pips, as on a standard double-six set. Every board draws distinct tiles from that set, so no two dominoes in your tray are identical.
- Do the puzzles have only one solution?
- Not necessarily, and that is by design. The win condition is covering every square while satisfying every region, and on larger boards more than one arrangement can qualify. Generation caps how many arrangements a board allows so it still takes real thought.
How today's board was made
Every board here comes out of our own generator, and the order of operations is what guarantees it is fair. The engine lays down a complete, valid arrangement of dominoes first — before any rules exist. Only then does it divide the squares into regions and derive each region's rule from the values already sitting inside it. Because the solution exists before the constraints do, an unsolvable board cannot be published; there is nothing to go wrong in that direction.
Difficulty comes from a second pass: rules are loosened one at a time — an exact total traded for a ≠, a < 4, or nothing at all — and each swap is kept only while the number of valid arrangements stays small enough that the board still takes real thought. An easy board keeps most of its exact sums; a hard board trades them away until elimination is the only tool left. Finally, everything is seeded from the date, so this page shows the same puzzle to everyone today and the archive link for today will show it forever.
None of this is copied from any other publisher. The domino-into-regions format is a shared game mechanic — like sudoku's grid or the crossword's clues — and the specific boards are ours. The full detail is in the editorial policy, and the honest comparison with the original is on the NYT pips archive page.