Pips Answer for Saturday, September 20, 2025

I kicked off today's session by diving into Ian Livengood's Easy puzzle, which was a great way to get my brain moving. The first thing I noticed were all those sum-10 regions. When you see a 10 in a two-cell region, your mind should immediately jump to the 5-5 domino. I placed the [5,5] into the vertical slot on the right side. For the other 10-sums, I had to be a bit more careful, using the [1,6] and [5,4] logic to fill the gaps. Moving on to Heidi Erwin's Medium board, the challenge shifted toward equality. I always look for the smallest sums first, like those target 1 regions. They act as anchors.

Once I knew where the 0s and 1s were, the rest of the dominoes like the [3,2] and [2,2] started falling into place by simple deduction. The Hard puzzle was a real beast today. That sum-0 region is a huge hint though—anytime you see a sum of 0, you know those cells are all zeros. I used that to clear out the [0,1] and [0,2] dominoes early on. The hardest part was the 'equals' region spanning four cells across the middle. I had to look at my remaining tray and realize that only the mid-range pips would satisfy both that and the surrounding sums. I spent a good five minutes just swapping the [6,5] and [6,3] positions until the 'unequal' constraint finally made sense. It felt like a giant game of Tetris where the pieces have math homework attached to them.