What Is NYT Pips?
NYT Pips is a daily logic puzzle from The New York Times in which you drag dominoes onto a color-coded board so that every region satisfies its rule. Each domino shows two halves of pips (the dots, 0 through 6), and each colored region tells you what the pips inside it must add up to, match, or stay under. Solve all three boards and you have today's NYT Pips answers.
Pips launched worldwide on August 18, 2025 as the first original logic puzzle built in-house by NYT Games — every board is handcrafted by human constructors rather than generated by an algorithm. That handcrafted quality is exactly why so many players search for NYT Pips hints today: a single tight region can lock up an entire board, and a small nudge is often all you need to finish it yourself.
This page updates every day with the full set of NYT Pips answers for the Easy, Medium, and Hard boards. The hints above are deliberately progressive, so you can reveal just one clue, keep the puzzle alive, and only look at the solved board when you are truly stuck. If you want the answer immediately, the "Reveal Solution" button on each difficulty shows the complete board at once.
How to Play NYT Pips
The rules of Pips are quick to learn but the deductions get deep fast. Here is the full process from an empty board to a finished one:
- Read the regions first. The board is split into colored regions, and each region carries a symbol that defines the rule its cells must obey. Understanding the symbols is the entire game, so start there before you place a single domino.
- Place a domino. Drag a domino from the tray onto two connected empty cells. Tap or click the domino to rotate it 90 degrees so it fits horizontally or vertically.
- Respect every region a domino touches. A single domino can straddle two different regions, and each of its two halves must independently satisfy the rule of the region it lands in.
- Fill the whole board. You win when every cell is covered and every region's condition is satisfied at the same time. There is no timer and no penalty for experimenting.
The symbols you will see inside Pips regions are the key to reading any of today's NYT Pips answers. This table covers all of them:
| Region symbol | What the pips must do |
|---|---|
| A number (e.g. 5) | All pips in the region must add up to exactly that number. |
| = (equals) | Every cell in the region must show the same number of pips. |
| ≠ (not equal) | The pip values in the region must all be different from one another. |
| < n (less than) | The region's pip total must be less than the number shown. |
| > n (greater than) | The region's pip total must be greater than the number shown. |
| Blank region | No constraint — any domino fits, as long as it covers the cells. |
One rule trips up almost every new player: in Pips, touching dominoes do not need to match their pip values the way classic dominoes do. The only thing that matters is whether each region's rule is satisfied. Forget the traditional matching habit and Pips becomes far more intuitive.
How to Read Today's Pips Answers
When you reveal a solved board on this page, you are looking at the official NYT Pips answer rendered as a finished grid. Each colored tile is one half of a domino, and the dots on it are the pip value that belongs in that cell. The small badge in the corner of a region repeats its rule — a number for a sum, an equals sign for an all-equal region, or a less-than or greater-than symbol for a capped total — so you can check exactly why each pip sits where it does.
Reading the answer this way is more useful than just copying it. If you trace one region at a time and confirm that its pips obey the symbol, you train the pattern recognition that makes the next day's Pips hints unnecessary. The Easy board is the best place to practice that habit before moving up.
How to Solve Pips Faster: Strategy Tips
The players who finish the Hard board quickly are not guessing — they follow a consistent order of operations. These are the strategies that turn a stuck board into a solved one:
- Start with the most constrained region. A region that must sum to a very low number, or one marked with the equals symbol, has the fewest legal domino combinations. Lock those in first and the rest of the board narrows quickly.
- Use blank and single-cell regions as anchors. A one-cell region with a fixed sum tells you the exact pip value for that square, which immediately constrains the domino that has to reach into it.
- Count your remaining pips. Because you can see the full domino tray, you can add up which pip values are still available and rule out placements that would leave an impossible region.
- Work the edges before the dense middle. On the Hard board, the outer regions usually have fewer neighbors and fewer options, so solving them first removes ambiguity from the center.
- Remember dominoes can span two regions. When a region seems impossible on its own, check whether a domino reaching in from a neighboring region supplies the value you need.
A good general rhythm is to solve the Easy board first to learn the day's "feel," then carry that momentum into Medium and Hard. The constructors often reuse a theme across difficulties, so the Easy solution can hint at how the harder boards want to be approached.
Pips Easy vs Medium vs Hard
Every day NYT Pips publishes three separate boards, and they are genuinely different puzzles rather than the same board with more or fewer hints. Here is how they compare:
| Difficulty | Dominoes | Feel |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | Around 5–6 | Loose constraints and plenty of blank space; great for learning the symbols. |
| Medium | Around 7–9 | Mixed constraint types that require real deduction, not just trial and error. |
| Hard | Up to ~16 | Tightly interlocking regions where one wrong tile cascades; the board most people search answers for. |
If you are new to Pips, play the Easy board until the symbols feel automatic, then graduate to Medium. The Hard board rewards the systematic, edge-first approach described above, and it is the one where a single Pips hint from this page can save you ten minutes of backtracking.
Pips vs Sudoku and Other NYT Logic Games
Pips is often compared to Sudoku because both are pure logic puzzles with a single correct solution, but they exercise different skills. Sudoku is about elimination across rows, columns, and boxes using the digits 1–9. Pips is about satisfying arithmetic constraints — sums, equalities, and inequalities — while physically fitting two-cell dominoes onto an irregular board. The spatial fitting layer is what makes Pips feel fresh even to seasoned Sudoku solvers.
Within the wider NYT Games lineup, Pips sits alongside word games like Wordle, Connections, and Strands, plus the four-board word challenge Quordle. If you enjoy the deductive, no-luck nature of Pips, the logic-forward half of that lineup will feel like home, and you can find daily hints and answers for all of them across this site.
Frequently Asked Questions
A new set of NYT Pips boards is released daily at midnight Eastern Time, the same schedule as Wordle and Connections. This page is refreshed each day with the new Easy, Medium, and Hard answers shortly after release.
Yes. A domino can straddle the boundary between two regions, and when it does, each of its two halves must independently satisfy the rule of whichever region that half lands in. This is one of the most important ideas for solving the Hard board.
No. Unlike traditional dominoes, Pips never requires touching tiles to share a value. The only thing that matters is that every colored region satisfies its sum, equals, or inequality rule. Dropping the matching habit makes the puzzle much easier to read.
A plain number means the region's pips must sum to exactly that value. An equals sign means every cell in the region must show the same pip value. A less-than or greater-than symbol with a number means the region's total must stay below or above that number. A blank region has no constraint.
The daily NYT Pips puzzle is available in the NYT Games app and at nytimes.com/games. Like the other NYT logic games, the current daily boards are playable, while full archive access is part of a NYT Games subscription. The answers on this page are always free.
Pips and Sudoku are both single-solution logic puzzles, but Pips adds a spatial layer: you must fit two-cell dominoes onto an irregular board while satisfying arithmetic rules. Many experienced Sudoku solvers find the Easy and Medium Pips boards comparable, with the Hard board demanding a more systematic, edge-first approach.
NYT Pips publishes Easy, Medium, and Hard boards every day so players of every level have a fitting challenge. They are three distinct handcrafted puzzles, not the same board with hints added or removed, which is why this page lists separate answers for each difficulty.