Past NYT Pips Answers: Yesterday & All Solutions

About This Archive of Past Pips Answers

This page keeps every past NYT Pips answer since the game launched on August 18, 2025. Yesterday's three solved boards — Easy, Medium and Hard — sit at the top, hidden until you tap; every earlier day is listed by month, and recent days open a page with each board drawn in its solved position.

The boards aren't screenshots. Each solution is rebuilt from the official puzzle data — the same file the game loads — so every domino, every pip and every region rule is exactly what the puzzle used. Each row of the list shows the puzzle number, the domino count for all three difficulties and who set the Hard board, which makes it easy to find the day you're looking for even if you don't remember the date.

For today's boards, with hints that start from one forced placement and build up, go to NYT Pips answers today.

How to Read a Solved Pips Board

Every Pips answer on this site is drawn the same way, so once you can read one you can read them all:

• Dominoes are the dark-outlined pairs. Each half shows its pips, from blank to six.
• Colours are regions. Both halves of a domino can belong to different regions; the colour of each half tells you which.
• A number badge is the target sum: the pips in that region must add up to it.
• = and ≠ mean every half in the region shows the same number, or that they're all different.
• < and > cap the region's total below or above a value.
• No badge means the region has no rule — any value fits.

Sum regions are by far the most common rule in the archive, followed by equals regions; ≠ regions are the rarest, which is why they're so often the key to a Hard board when they do appear.

Easy vs Medium vs Hard: How Pips Difficulty Scales

Looking across every Pips answer in the archive, difficulty is mostly a question of size. Easy boards almost always use four to six dominoes, with five by far the most common. Medium sits around seven. Hard is where the range opens up: more than nine in ten Hard boards use between ten and sixteen dominoes, and sixteen is the biggest the archive has seen so far.

More pieces means more regions and fewer forced moves, so the strategy changes too. On Easy you can usually find a domino with only one legal spot and work outward. On Hard, the fastest route is to start from the most restrictive rules — a small sum region, an equals region of three or four halves, a ≠ region — and use them to limit which dominoes can go where before placing anything.

If a particular Hard board defeated you, open its page from the list above, find the region that would have unlocked it, and compare your attempt with the finished layout. Past Pips answers are the best practice material there is.

Patterns You'll See Again and Again

Flick through a few weeks of solved boards and the same logical shortcuts keep coming back. Spotting them on your own board is most of the skill:

1. One-cell sum regions are free placements. A region of a single half with a target sum tells you that half's exact value.
2. Equals regions love doubles. When an equals region covers both halves of one domino, that domino must be a double — and there's usually only one double of the right value left.
3. Big sums need sixes; tiny sums need blanks. A three-cell region that must total 17 or 18 can only be built from sixes and fives, while a sum of 0 or 1 forces blanks.
4. ≠ regions eliminate fast. In a four-cell “all different” region, each value you place removes options from three other cells at once.
5. Count the leftovers. Near the end, list the dominoes you haven't used. On Hard boards the last three or four placements are usually forced by elimination alone.

Every Pips answer page draws its boards with the region rules visible, so you can check each of these patterns against a real solution.

How Each Board Is Rebuilt

The official puzzle data for each day lists every domino, every region with its rule, and the solution's domino positions. We store that data as it arrives each day — and fill older days from the same official source — then draw the solved board from it: each half placed in its cell, coloured by its region, with the region's rule badge on its anchor cell. Nothing is typed in by hand, so the boards in this archive of Pips answers match the puzzle you played exactly.

Who Sets NYT Pips?

Pips is edited by Ian Livengood, and each board carries its setter's name. In the archive, Ian Livengood sets most Easy boards, Rodolfo Kurchan — a veteran logic-puzzle constructor — sets most Hard boards, and Heidi Erwin contributes boards at every level. The setter chart in the statistics section is counted across all three difficulties of every Pips answer we hold.

Setters have styles you can learn. Some lean on large sum regions that need careful arithmetic; others build chains of equals and ≠ regions that force a sequence of placements. Browsing past Pips answers by setter is a good way to anticipate what kind of reasoning tomorrow's Hard board will ask for.

Practising With Past Pips Answers

The archive is also a practice set. Pick a day from the list, open its page and keep the boards folded. Copy the empty grid from the region colours and rule badges in your head — or on paper — and solve it before you peek. Because each difficulty folds separately, you can work through Easy, check it, then move up to Medium and Hard on the same day.

Start with older Medium boards if Hard feels out of reach: the seven-domino Medium layout is where most of the patterns above first appear, without the elimination load of a sixteen-domino Hard board.

Pips Answer Yesterday: Finding the Right Day

The panel at the top always holds the boards from the day before today. If you played late and the game has already moved on, your puzzle is either yesterday's or the first row of the table beside it — match the puzzle number (#1 was August 18, 2025, and the number rises by one each day) or the domino counts you remember.

Missed a day entirely? Every Pips answer in the month-by-month list is still here. Recent days link to the full solved boards; older days list the puzzle number, size and setter, and more full board pages are added over time.

Past Pips Answers FAQ