If you were hoping for another New York Times game to satisfy your word-puzzling itching, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Pips, the latest addition to the New York Times’ growing game Corral, is a wordless, domino-filled exercise in entertainment and occasional frustration.
Pips launched on Monday (August 18) online and iOS and Android are a departure from Global Phenomenon Wordle and its cousin games, connections and threads (as well as competitors such as Quordle). It has no letters, no words that are jumbles or even subject -driven associations.
The only playing pieces on the Pips Tiny Game Board are five dominoes. Yes, like the dominos you played with as a child, or still spend in real life with games like tiles (no, not the same as News’s own “tiles” games). By the way, pips are the dots of a domino.
What is the poenget with pips?
Picture 1 of 2
The purpose of the game is to place all your dominos on the board by meeting certain requirements on board. These are described via color coding, indicating which tiles are included in a state, and small tags that define the condition (often a value) of dominos, you can fall into one or more squares.
As you may remember, dominoes have values on those ranging from zero (blank) to six pips. Each domino may have inconsistent numbers or matching numbers. These are these numbers and combinations that you need to be aware of when trying to find out each pips -logic puzzle.
This is the first New York Times game we can remember in recent times that allows for three levels of games a day – light, medium and hard – and which allows you to play them all on the same day. As soon as you start playing, a timer starts.
Playing pips
On the game card you see labels like “> 3” (“greater than three”), “<13" for ("less than 13") or "=" (indicates that all squares have the same number). In both cases, the pipes on the tiles must fulfill these conditions, either individually or collectively.
To satisfy these conditions takes some non-linear thinking. Conditional colors across multiple tile squares do not necessarily mean that you use both squares on a domino to accommodate these conditions.
Sometimes you have to look for a condition or a few conditions that can only be satisfied by one of the five tiles you have been given.
I started with the lightweight game and solved it in 31 seconds. Felt pretty good with myself, I switched to hard and found myself fighting for almost 10 minutes. Medium took me almost six minutes. Now I think at least I understand how I play the game and hope I 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, gaming level, a color code that I assume reflects your performance and time. For 31 seconds I got a green dot. In 5:56 I got a yellow and for 9:26 I got a red dot.
Pips certainly work a different mental muscle than Wordle, but overall it feels less concise and maybe a little less fun. There is a wonderful combination of erudition and simplicity for Wordle that I cherish. As a writer, I love word games like that, including connections and threads. I also think gamification, results and competitions that are the result of games like Wordle are more universally relatable.
I’m not even sure how you would write the daily guide to pips. The level of complexity and thought can make every day to read a beaten or worse, very frustrating.
We use all words every day to communicate. We have a feeling that our suitability for the English language is a certain degree of our intelligence and whether it is true or not we love to dip each other when we get Wordle in two or even an attempt.
There is no obvious pips -equivalent with “Got it in 2!” And for that reason, this is no Wordle, but maybe it’s just ok.
