We'll Help You Party Down! We're an American Band 🇺🇸
Listen up, fellow intellectual disappointments. You know who you are. You're the ones still stuck on level 347 of Candy Crush Saga while your coworkers are flexing their five-day Wordle streaks. You've never successfully completed a Sunday crossword without Googling "What's a four-letter word for existential dread?" (It's "Monday," by the way.) Your Sudoku attempts look like a toddler's attempt at abstract art, and don't even get us started on Connections – you once confidently grouped "Orange," "Banana," "Apple," and "Car" together because they all have vowels.
Well, rejoice, my puzzle-challenged compatriots! The New York Times has blessed us with Pips, their latest puzzle sensation launched on August 18, 2025, and it might just be the game that finally makes you feel intellectually adequate.
Pips is a logic puzzle inspired by dominoes where players drag and drop domino-style tiles onto a grid, solving number-based conditions. Think of it as dominoes' nerdy cousin who went to college and learned some manners, but still knows how to have fun at family gatherings.
Unlike Wordle, which judges you silently with those yellow and green squares, or Scrabble (which makes you feel personally attacked when your opponent plays "QUIXOTIC" for 847 points while you're sitting there with seven vowels and the letter Z); Pips is refreshingly straightforward. You fill the board with dominoes, drag and drop them into place, and tap to rotate them. It's like adult Legos, but with math – and before you panic, it's the kind of math that doesn't require you to remember what you learned in calculus (spoiler alert: nothing).
Remember when you thought you were getting good at Yahtzee, only to realize you'd been calculating the scoring wrong for three years? Or when you confidently played "QUACK" in Scrabble, placing it perpendicular to "QUIET," creating the devastating double-word score of... wait, that's not a word, is it?
Pips doesn't judge. With three levels of difficulty, it meets you where you are – whether that's "barely functional" or "occasionally competent." The dominoes don't mock you for not knowing that "ADZE" is apparently a word (seriously, what even is an adze?). They just sit there, patiently waiting for you to figure out that the double-six goes in the green zone.
The New York Times has built a reputation for producing Internet puzzles that players find instantly addictive while also being unusually elegant, and Pips continues this tradition without the existential crisis that usually accompanies NYT games.
It's like Candyland for grown-ups who've given up on impressing anyone. You're not trying to prove you have a vast vocabulary or can solve complex mathematical theorems. You're just trying to make the little domino dots add up correctly, which, let's be honest, is about the right level of challenge for someone whose greatest gaming achievement is finally beating their mom at Go Fish.
So put down that Sudoku book that's been taunting you from your coffee table for six months. Close that Wordle tab that's been open since Tuesday (we see you). Pips is fresh, intuitive, and just the right addition to your daily ritual – assuming your daily ritual involves controlled intellectual failure and the occasional minor victory.
Finally, a puzzle game that doesn't make you question your entire educational background. Welcome to Pips, where the dots connect, the dominoes fall into place, and nobody judges you for still not understanding how Connections works.
