Hi everyone,

I’m an indie developer learning Next.js and a big fan of the NYT game Pips. Inspired by it, I built https://pipsgamer.com — a responsive web version of Pips with smooth gameplay on both desktop and mobile.

What makes this project different from NYT’s version is that you can play it infinitely under three difficulty levels: Easy / Medium / Hard.

This is the first time I’ve built a game. Along the way I ran into many difficulties: implementing the game logic, configuring the UI, matching layouts for small and large screens, etc. I spent many lonely nights and sometimes even doubted whether I could complete the whole project. After 24 days of persistent effort, the project is finally finished.

No signup required — just go and play. If you try it out I’d really appreciate your feedback: what you like, what bugs you see, what could be improved.

Thanks!

One UX feature I wish existed on the NYT game that you should add here is that I wish I could organize my dominoes. E.g. I wish I could put all the pieces with a zero into part of my playing area.

I was confused by the description of the green rule. Based on its behavior, I think it should be "the sum of dots in the region should equal this number". It's not "all dots must be the same". So the green and the blue are behaving the same?

Great job! Congrats on shipping - I just played and it worked as designed.

Extremely minor nit: in the "how to play" example, on the far right, the rule is ">5" but the domino has a 1 and a 4. HTH

I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I'm really surprised by how bad the UX is in many of the NYT games. Manipulating the dominoes in Pips just feels awkward and buggy.

And I know making games is difficult, but 1. games are a really significant portion of their subscription income, 2. there's obviously a lot of talent working at the Times (looking at their data vis stuff for example) 3. these games are (deliberately) simple, so why not iterate a bit more on making the few moving parts feel good?

Like, I think there's competent developers working at the Times. And building a pleasant, robust version of these simple games for one of the most prestigious employers in the world seems like it would be a really interesting and stimulating job. So I'd expect better results.

Also: I think this looks great and that your version is actually a bit nicer to use. Well done!

I encountered a Pips puzzle in NYT once which didnt have a unique solution. This was very confusing as I was expecting these puzzles are curated and the designers would use tools to design unique and interesting puzzles.

Why is it not possible to drag already placed domino out of the puzzle?

Congrats on shipping! Just tried and one quick feedback: disable the pull to refresh.