If you were hoping for yet another New York Times game to satisfy your word-puzzling itch, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Pips, the latest addition to The New York Times’ growing games corral, is a word-free, domino-filled exercise in entertainment and occasional frustration.
Pips, which was launched on Monday (August 18) online and iOS and Android, is a departure from the global phenomenon Wordle and its cousin games, Connections and Strands (as well as competitors like Quordle). It has no letters, no word jumbles, or even topic-driven associations.
The only playing pieces on Pip’s tiny game board are five dominoes. Yes, just like the dominoes you played with as a kid, or are still using in real life with games like Tiles (no, not the same as NYT’s own “Tiles” game). Pips, by the way, are the dots on a domino.
What’s the point of Pips?
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The object of the game is to place all your dominoes on the board by fulfilling certain on-board requirements. These are set out via color-coding, which indicates which Tiles are included in a condition, and small tags that define the condition (often a value) of dominos you can drop in one or more squares.
As you may recall, dominoes have values on them that range from zero (blank) to six pips. Each domino can have mismatched numbers or matching figures. It’s these numbers and combos you’ll need to pay close attention to as you try to work out each Pips logic puzzle.
This is the first New York Times game we can recall in recent times that allows for three levels of play per day – Easy, Medium, and Hard – and that lets you play all of them on the same day. As soon as you start playing, a timer starts.
Playing Pips
On the game board, you’ll see labels like “>3” (“greater than three”), “<13” for (“less than 13”), or “=” (indicating all squares feature the same number). In each case, the pips on the tiles have to meet those conditions, either individually or collectively.
Satisfying those conditions takes some non-linear thinking. Conditional colors across multiple tile squares do not necessarily mean that you’ll be using both squares on one domino to meet those conditions.
Sometimes you have to look for a condition or pair of conditions that can only be satisfied by one of the five tiles you’ve been given.
I started with the easy game and solved it in 31 seconds. Feeling pretty good about myself, I switched to Hard and found myself struggling for almost 10 minutes. Medium took me almost six minutes. Now, at least, I think I understand how to play the game and hope that I’ll do better tomorrow.
Sharing your Pips
As with all other New York Times games, you can share your score with friends. Shares show the Pips game number, game level, a color code that I assume reflects your performance, and time. For 31 seconds, I got a green dot. For 5:56, I got a yellow, and for 9:26, I got a red dot.
Pips certainly works a different mental muscle than Wordle, but overall, it feels less succinct and maybe a little less fun. There’s a glorious combination of erudition and simplicity to Wordle that I cherish. As a writer, I love word games like it, including Connections and Strands. I also think the gamification, results, and competitions that result from games like Wordle are more universally relatable.
I’m not even sure how you would write the daily guide for Pips. The level of complexity and thought might make each daily read a slog or worse, highly frustrating.
We all use words every day to communicate. We have a sense that our aptitude for the English language is some measure of our intelligence, and whether or not that’s true, we love to dunk on each other when we get Wordle in two or even one try.
There’s no obvious Pips equivalent of “Got it in 2!” and for that reason, this is no Wordle, but that might just be OK.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
