Pips Answer for Tuesday, November 18, 2025

I started the day with the Easy puzzle, which felt like a nice warm-up. The first thing I noticed was the sum region at the bottom calling for an 8. Since I only had four dominoes to work with, the 2-6 was the only pair that could possibly fit there. Once I placed that, it forced the 4-4 domino into the vertical slot on the right side because of those 'equals' constraints. The 0-0 and 0-6 fell right into place after that to satisfy the remaining empty and equal spots. Moving on to the Medium, the sum of 11 at the bottom-left was my anchor. I scanned my inventory and realized I had to use pieces of the 6-1 and 2-5 dominoes to make that work.

The trickiest part of the Medium was the four-cell 'equals' region in the middle; it's basically a big block of the same number, and once I figured out it had to be 1s based on the 0-1 domino, the rest of the board cleared up quickly. The Hard puzzle was a real brain-burner today. Rodolfo Kurchan designed a grid where almost every region summed to 9. I spent a good five minutes just staring at the dominoes, trying to see which ones could even contribute to a 9. I found that the 5-4 combination (from different dominoes) and the 6-3 were essential. I focused on the 'equals' region at the bottom-left (6,0 and 6,1) to lock down the 2-2 domino early. After that, it was a game of domino-sudoku, making sure that as I placed the 5-5 and 5-6, I wasn't blocking the smaller 2-1 or 3-3 pieces from filling their specific sum requirements.