Pips Answer for Friday, January 30, 2026

Solving this set of Pips puzzles was a great way to start the morning. I always start with the Easy one to get my brain in the right gear. For Ian Livengood's Easy puzzle, I immediately spotted that cell at [1,2] which had to be less than 1. Since zero is the only option there, I knew that domino had to be the 0-6 one. From there, I looked at the sum of 7 for the next two cells. It really narrowed things down because once you place that 0, the rest of the board starts to feel much tighter. I tracked the equality regions—where cells have to have the exact same number of pips—and that helped me slot the 1-1 and 2-3 dominoes into their places without much fuss. Moving on to the Medium by Rodolfo Kurchan, the difficulty definitely stepped up. The big 'unequal' region with six different cells was the centerpiece. In a puzzle where you only have dominoes up to 5, an unequal region of six cells means every single value from 0 to 5 must appear exactly once in those spots.

I used that as my anchor. I also had to be careful with the empty cells at [0,0] and [4,2], as they act like walls that block domino placement. I focused on the sum of 6 in the first column and that let me deduce where the higher-value pips like the 5-3 and 4-5 dominoes had to sit. Finally, the Hard puzzle was a massive grid with 14 dominoes. Kurchan loves these long equality chains. Seeing that cells [2,0] all the way to [2,4] had to be equal was a huge hint. It meant whatever dominoes crossed that row had to have matching pips on those specific sides. I spent a lot of time double-checking the sum targets of 5 and 12. The sum of 12 for three cells at the edge [2,6], [3,6], and [4,6] was particularly helpful because there are only a few ways to get that high with the dominoes provided. I worked from the bottom up, filling in the [8,1] and [8,2] equality spots and then zigzagged through the middle until the last few dominoes, like the 0-0 and 6-0, fell into the only remaining gaps.