Games like Pips: daily domino and placement puzzles

Start with Pips2 Daily if you want more of exactly what Pips gives you. It is an independent site, not part of The New York Times, with the same kind of board: place every domino from the rack so each coloured region meets its sum, equal, not-equal, less-than or greater-than rule, on Easy, Medium and Hard boards for each date. It is free with ads in the browser, and the Pips2 iPhone app is a one-off purchase.

Domino Fit is the next closest. It is also a domino tiling puzzle with numbers: you cover the board with two kinds of domino so that every row and column adds up to its target, in three daily sizes. The Special Daily Dominosa turns the idea around: the numbers are already on the grid, and you work out where each domino from a full set must lie, using every pair exactly once; PuzzleMadness posts its own daily Dominosa in Small, Medium, Large and Mixed sizes, with leaderboards. Daily Norinori is a shading puzzle whose shaded cells form separate dominoes, a good next step if you enjoy the spatial side of Pips more than the sums; PuzzleMadness posts NoriNori at Easy, Medium and Hard each day on smaller grids, which suit a first try better than the one large Daily Norinori.

If the region rules are what you like, sum puzzles are the closest relatives. Dodeku from Fox Point Games has you place number tiles so every row and column hits its sum, Cagey gives a daily grid of arithmetic cages with a leaderboard, and the daily Killer Sudoku, Cages from Mind Loft (a killer sudoku that starts with no digits) and Kakuro grids ask for the same kind of sums. Pìbera keeps the row and column totals of Domino Fit but has you lay runs of falling numbers, each ending in 1, until every edge total comes down to zero. Pipcross from Puzzmallow swaps dominoes for dice: you place dice so their pips match nonogram-style run clues.

For the pleasure of fitting pieces, Tessellot gives three outlined shapes a day to fill exactly with four to six polyomino pieces, scored in moves, and Inlay from Nerdcube asks you to fill one target shape a day with pentominoes. Daydoku asks you to cover a calendar board so that only today's date is left showing, as do Daily Calendar Puzzle in the browser (eight pieces, today's month and day), The Calendar Puzzle on the web and iPhone (Mini, Daily and Weekday boards), Andrew Lau's Daily Calendar Puzzle app for iPhone (month, date and weekday) and DragonFjord's A-Puzzle-A-Day app. Birds Organized Neatly packs hand-drawn birds of every shape into a grid each day, a paid Steam game whose daily opens after its 80 main levels. Hextle does the same on a honeycomb: the day's polyhex pieces go into a 19-cell board, counted in moves. Snug from Mind Loft gives a 6x6 board with a few squares missing and a handful of pieces that cover it in only one way, with a larger 7x7 board on Sundays. Daily Bricks packs the day's pixel bricks into a 6x6 box against the clock, PuzzleMadness's SquareBlocks covers a grid with block pieces at three difficulties, with HexaBlocks and TriangleBlocks doing the same on boards of hexagons and triangles, and Jigsy lets you rotate pieces and double their size to fill three grids a day. Quilt, a free iPhone and iPad app, turns tiling into pure deduction: you split the day's grid into rectangles whose size and shape match the clues, one board a day for everyone.

Pips itself has three puzzles a day, from easy to hard, and so do Pips2 Daily, Tessellot and Jigsy. Domino Fit, Pipcross, Daydoku and the PuzzleMadness puzzles also post several boards a day in different sizes or difficulties, so you can start small; most of the others post one board a day. Every daily deduction puzzle we list is on the daily logic puzzles page.