Daily hints · NYT Pips

NYT Pips archive

Pips is a domino puzzle: lay tiles so that every marked region obeys its own rule about the pips inside it. Three boards arrive each day at different difficulties, and they are genuinely separate puzzles rather than one puzzle scaled up. We write the hints board by board and add a note on where to start. Past days show how far apart easy and hard actually were.

2 past days published, covering August 10, 2026 to August 11, 2026. Each page carries the full hint set and the answers in the open.

How Pips works

Dominoes laid onto a board divided into marked regions, each region stating its own rule about the pips inside it: a total to hit exactly, a number to stay above or below, every cell matching, or no pips at all. A domino covers two cells, so a piece placed to satisfy one region is always half-committed to whatever sits next to it. Three boards arrive daily at easy, medium and hard.

What a dated page holds

All three boards for that date, each with the hints as published and a walkthrough underneath explaining which constraint to solve first and why the rest follows from it. The walkthroughs are the reason to come back to an old date: they name the deduction rather than just the placement, and the deduction is the part that transfers to tomorrow.

What builds up here

The distance between the easy board and the hard one is not fixed, and past dates are the only place you can see it. Some days the hard board is a genuine hour of work; some days it collapses in ten minutes because one region turns out to have a single possible filling. Comparing dates teaches you which constraints are actually tight and which only look it.

Other puzzle archives

Today's NYT Pips hints