Sunday brings a fresh set of NYT Pips puzzles. Expect a balanced Sunday spread: the exact-number and equality zones do most of the heavy lifting, so lock those in first and the rest of the grid falls into place.
We've got hints, step-by-step walkthroughs, and full solutions for Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulty levels.
How to Play Pips
Pips is a domino placement puzzle where you fill a grid of color-coded zones. Each zone has a condition you must satisfy using the pip values on your dominoes.
The twist: you must use every domino and meet every condition to win.
Zone Conditions:
- = All pips in this zone must equal the same number
- Not Equal All pips must be different numbers
- > Pips must be greater than the listed number
- < Pips must be less than the listed number
- Exact Number Pips must total that exact value
- No Color Free space, any domino value works
Click or tap dominoes to rotate them. Each puzzle has one or more valid solutions.
Today's Easy Pips
Today's Medium Pips
Today's Hard Pips
Puzzle Debrief
Overall Difficulty: Moderate challenge. All three levels share the same 15-domino layout, so the difficulty comes from managing the constrained exact-number zones and the shared teal (>16) build rather than from unique grids.
Trickiest Puzzle: Hard - The orange (8) zone is the trap. With only the 6/2 domino able to fill it, one careless move that spends either half of that domino forces a full grid reset.
The Hard level punishes that mistake hardest because every adjacent zone is already tight.
Our Take: A clean, well-structured Sunday set that rewards a disciplined order of operations: solve the exact-number and equality zones first, then let the inequality zones fill themselves in. The shared layout across difficulties is a nice touch, letting you sharpen your approach as you climb from Easy to Hard.
Solid practice for anyone working on constraint-first thinking.
Tomorrow's Pips drops at midnight. See you then.
