Sunday brings a fresh set of NYT Pips puzzles. Today's board stacks equality and threshold zones on top of each other, so precision beats speed. 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. The layout stays consistent across all three tiers, but the stacked equality zones reward deliberate sequencing over guesswork.
Trickiest Puzzle: Hard - the low-value zones look interchangeable at a glance but enforce different rules, and one zero-total zone hides an exact-total constraint behind a label that reads like an equality condition.
Our Take: Today's set rewards solvers who treat exact zones as fixed anchors and build outward. The matching-value cluster is the real gatekeeper, and players who burn their low-value pieces too early will stall out fast. Solve the constraints, not the picture, and the grid falls into place.
Tomorrow's Pips drops at midnight. See you then.
