Wednesday brings a fresh set of NYT Pips puzzles. Today's boards are a tight, condition-heavy set, the kind where the strict zones do all the talking and the loose ones just take up space. 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 zone spread rewards patience over instinct. The high-threshold zone is visually dominant but forgiving, and the boards punish anyone who front-loads it instead of letting the equality zones set the terms.
Our Take: Today's set is a clean lesson in constraint ordering: the loudest condition is rarely the most restrictive one. Every board here is solvable without guessing if you rank zones by how little they tolerate rather than how much space they occupy. That habit pays off across all three difficulties.
Tomorrow's Pips drops at midnight. See you then.