NYT Pips Hints

What Is NYT Pips?

Pips is a daily domino puzzle from the New York Times. You are given a grid split into coloured regions and a set of dominoes, and you place every domino so that each region satisfies the rule printed on it. Every square gets covered and every domino gets used.

It arrived in August 2025 and is the only number-led game in the NYT Games app — the rest are built on words. That makes it a different kind of daily habit: there is no vocabulary to fall back on, just constraint and deduction. If you have played Sudoku or Kakuro the feeling will be familiar, though Pips is far shorter.

A short game with a long tail

The appeal is the shape of the difficulty curve. An easy board is solved almost by inspection; a hard one asks you to hold three or four half-deductions in your head at once and then find the placement that resolves them together. That is a lot of range for a game that fits in a coffee break, and it is why the help people look for here is usually not the whole answer — just the one placement that unlocks the rest.

Three boards, not one

Unlike Wordle or Connections, Pips ships three separate puzzles a day. The easy board is almost always five dominoes and takes a minute; the hard board runs from eleven to sixteen and can take considerably longer. Most people play all three, which is why the NYT Pips hints on this page are split by board rather than merged.

What Each Region Symbol Means

Every coloured region carries a rule, and reading them correctly is most of the game. There are five, plus regions with no rule at all.

• 4A number — the pips in this region must add up to exactly that.
• =Equals — every square in the region shows the same number.
• ≠Not equal — every square shows a different number.
• >5Greater than — the region's total must come in above the number.
• <7Less than — the total must stay below it.
• —No badge — the region carries no rule; anything can sit there.

Today's hard board leans on 7 regions that must all show the same number, 2 regions that must add up to 3, 1 region that must add up to 1, 1 region that must add up to 2 and 1 region that must add up to 5.

The rule people misread

"Equals" and a plain number look similar but demand opposite things. A region marked 6 might hold a 2 and a 4; a region marked "=" holding two squares must hold the same value twice, whatever it is. Getting those two confused is the single most common way a board goes wrong late.

6 Ways to Crack a Pips Board Faster

These are the habits that shorten a solve, roughly in the order to reach for them. Work through them before you scroll back up for the NYT Pips hints — most boards give way to the first two on their own.

1. Start where there is no choice. A single-square region with a fixed total has exactly one possible value. Every board has one or two, and they anchor everything else.
2. Read the dominoes, not just the grid. If a square must be a 6, check how many of today's dominoes even contain a 6. Often the answer is one.
3. Use the "≠" regions as filters. A five-square region where everything differs consumes five distinct values, which tells you a great deal about what is left for everywhere else.
4. Count the total. All the pips on all the dominoes have to land somewhere. Sum the fixed-total regions and compare — the gap tells you what the unconstrained squares must absorb.
5. Watch orientation, not just position. A domino can go either way round. Half the failed placements people make are the right domino facing the wrong direction.
6. Do the easy board first. It uses the same rule types as the hard one at a quarter of the size, so it is the fastest way to warm up on the day's particular mix.

Why the Hard Board Takes So Much Longer

The jump from easy to hard is not gentle. Across the boards we track, easy is fixed at five dominoes and ten squares while hard runs between eleven and sixteen dominoes over twenty-two to thirty-two squares — three times the board, and far more than three times the work.

The reason is that difficulty in Pips comes from interaction, not size. On a small board most regions touch one or two others, so a deduction stays local: fix a square, place a domino, move on. On a large board a single placement can constrain four regions at once, and the wrong one does not fail immediately — it fails six moves later, when a region you had not looked at turns out to be unsatisfiable. That is the experience people describe as getting stuck, and it is really a bookkeeping problem rather than a logic one.

What that means for how you play it

On the hard board, resist placing anything you are not certain about. A forced square is worth more than three plausible ones, because a plausible placement you later have to undo takes every deduction built on top of it with it. Working only from certainties is slower for the first minute and much faster overall.

Common Pips Mistakes

• Treating "=" as a total. A region marked "=" wants matching numbers, not a matching sum. This is the error that survives longest, because the board stays legal until the very end.
• Forgetting a domino can flip. Every piece has two orientations. If a placement nearly works, try it the other way round before discarding it.
• Leaving the unconstrained squares till last. Regions with no badge still have to be covered, and they still consume dominoes. They are not spare space.
• Ignoring the pip budget. The total number of pips is fixed before you start. If your fixed-total regions already account for most of it, the rest of the board has to be very low — that alone rules out whole sets of placements.
• Starting with the hard board. The easy board uses the same rule mix at a quarter of the size. Playing it first tells you what kind of day it is.

Pips vs the Rest of NYT Games

Pips is the outlier in the NYT Games line-up, and it draws a different crowd for it.

If the word games are more your thing, here are today's Connections answer, today's Strands answers, and today's Letter Boxed answer.