Sunday brings a fresh set of NYT Pips puzzles. Today's boards lean on the same zone vocabulary across all three difficulties, which makes them a clean test of reading conditions before you touch a domino. We've got a quick hint for each of the Easy, Medium, and Hard puzzles, plus the debrief.
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 zone roster is identical to Easy and Medium, so the difficulty comes entirely from how tightly the constraints interlock. There is no new rule to learn, which means every mistake is a reading mistake.
Our Take: Today's set is a lesson in constraint discipline. All three boards share the same zone vocabulary, so the players who slow down and rank zones by strictness will finish clean while the ones who start with the largest zones will backtrack. If you got stuck, the fix was almost certainly earlier in the solve than where you noticed it.
Tomorrow's Pips drops at midnight. See you then.