Sunday brings a fresh set of NYT Pips puzzles. A steady, fair set to close the week: one tight board, one mid-weight grind, and one that punishes loose assumptions. We've got a quick hint for each of the Easy, Medium, and Hard puzzles.
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
Trickiest Puzzle: Hard - the strict inequality and exact-total zones sit next to each other, so a single loose placement cascades into a dead end several moves later.
Our Take: A well-built Sunday set. The Easy board teaches the rhythm, the Medium board tests your patience with a large zone that constrains everything, and the Hard board finally asks you to reason about ranges instead of values. The lesson: constraints beat intuition, every time.
Tomorrow's Pips drops at midnight. See you then.