Why A High IQ Won’t Help You Win At Pips
The neuroscience behind the new dominoes game from NYT
I was playing Pips the this morning, and for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about… my dentist. Odd, I know, but then I remembered something he once told me.
Dr. Katz doesn’t play games. Never has. Except for one: Tetris. He loves Tetris. He’s obsessed with it.
When I mentioned I was a game designer during my last cleaning, he got genuinely excited talking about how he’d spent hours “in the zone” and even watched the national championship. Not because he’s a gamer (he’s definitely not), but because something about fitting shapes into spaces just clicks for him.
That’s when I realized why my dentist kept popping into my head while playing Pips. Everyone’s calling NYT’s new puzzle “Wordle for math people,” but it’s not testing what people think it’s testing.
The Numbers Are Just Another Kind of Shape
Here’s the thing people miss about Pips: you’re not really doing math. You’re pattern-matching. When you see a domino with a ⚀ on it, your brain isn’t processing “1” as a mathematical concept. It’s seeing a visual property of a puzzle piece that needs to fit into a space that “wants” a ⚀.
In my college years, I designed over 50 games using dominoes, cards, and dice. What I learned is that even the numbers on dominoes function more like shapes than quantities. In Pips, this becomes crystal clear. You’re not calculating equations, you’re completing visual patterns.
Think about how it feels when you solve a Pips puzzle. The satisfaction doesn’t come from getting the math right. It comes from that “click” when pieces snap into place. This is the same feeling you get finishing a jigsaw puzzle. Your brain recognizes completion, not calculation.
The Cognitive Science of Pips
Research on spatial puzzle games reveals the specific mental abilities that games like Pips actually test:
Visuospatial Working Memory: Your brain’s ability to temporarily hold and manipulate visual information. This is what lets you mentally rotate a domino piece before placing it.
Mental Rotation: The capacity to rotate 2D and 3D objects in your mind. Think of it as your brain’s ability to spin things around without touching them.
Spatial Reasoning: Pattern recognition and understanding how objects relate to each other in space. This is what helps you see where pieces naturally belong.
Visual Processing: How quickly and accurately your brain processes visual information and spatial relationships.
The fascinating part? Studies show that performance on games like Tetris correlates strongly with these specific abilities but shows zero relationship to general intelligence measures or analytical reasoning skills. It has no relevance to IQ. Your brain has different operating systems, and Pips runs on the spatial one, not the analytical one.
It’s Tetris Trapped in Amber
Dr. Katz gets this instinctively. When he plays Tetris, he’s not thinking about optimal algorithms or mathematical probabilities. He’s seeing how shapes fit together: the same skill he uses positioning instruments in tight spaces during procedures.
Pips works the same way. All the pieces are given to you from the start. You’re not generating novel solutions or working through logical proofs. You’re solving what’s essentially a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that happens to use addition as its constraint system.
The numbers aren’t the puzzle, they’re just the rules governing how the shapes can fit together. Like how jigsaw pieces have those little tabs and blanks that determine which pieces connect.
Is Pips the Right Game for You?
Rather than struggle with whether you’re “smart enough” for Pips, ask yourself these questions:
- Do you enjoy jigsaw puzzles or tangrams?
- Are you good at parallel parking or backing a trailer?
- When you have nothing to do, do you gravitate toward Solitaire or match-3 games?
- Can you pack a suitcase efficiently?
- Do you enjoy organizing physical spaces like closets or bookshelves?
- Were you the kid who was great at Tetris or Dr. Mario?
- Do you find yourself mentally rearranging furniture when you walk into a room?
- Can you fold a fitted sheet properly?
If you answered yes to any of these, you might crush Pips. Notice that none of them required a math degree. They’re all about seeing how things fit together in space.
Also, like Tetris, Pips has variable difficulty levels, so don’t be afraid to give it a try: you an play it on “Easy.”
The people struggling with Pips aren’t less intelligent. They’re just approaching a spatial puzzle with the wrong cognitive toolkit. Meanwhile, my non-gaming dentist intuitively understands exactly what this game is asking his brain to do.
If I can manage it with a hook in my mouth, I’ll bring it up next time I see him.
Sam Liberty is a gamification expert, applied game designer, and consultant. His clients include The World Bank, Click Therapeutics, and DARPA. He teaches game design at Northeastern University. He is the former Lead Game Designer at Sidekick Health.
