Daily Pips: today's boards, and what every day so far adds up to

Today, October 18, 2026

Missed a day? The answers archive is listed by month back to the first board, and yesterday's Pips has its own page. Stuck rather than finished? The Pips hints guide explains how to take a nudge without spoiling the board. This site is independent and is not affiliated with The New York Times.

How do you pick a tier for the day?

Pick by the time and attention you actually have, not by ambition — because the three tiers are not three settings of one dial. The tables above show why. On the Times' side an easy board averages 9.9 squares and a hard one 26.4, so the hard board is not a slightly tougher version of the easy one; it is a board several times the size, usually built by a different person, with a region on almost every patch of grid. Choosing a tier is choosing a different kind of session.

A useful way to think about a Daily Pips habit with three tiers is as a ladder you can enter at any rung. The easy board is a warm-up: small enough to hold in your head whole, with enough unbadged squares that it rarely traps you. It is the right board for the days when you want the satisfaction of a finished grid in the gap before something else. The medium board is where the format starts to ask for a method rather than a glance — more regions than you can track at once, so you learn to start from the tightest constraint and work outward. The hard board is a sitting. On a ceiling-sized day it holds up to 32 squares and more regions than an easy board has squares, and it rewards writing nothing down only if you are unusually good at holding sums in your head.

Most people who keep a daily habit settle into one of three patterns. The first is the full ladder: easy, then medium, then hard, in that order, every day. The easy and medium boards act as a warm-up for the reading skills the hard board needs — spotting the region with only one legal filling, placing the doubles early, counting the pips left in the tray. The second is the single tier: one board, the same one each day, chosen because it fits the time available. There is nothing lesser about this; the weekday table says a Monday board and a Sunday board of the same tier are, on average, within a square or so of each other, so a single-tier habit is a consistent one. The third is the variable day: easy on a busy morning, hard when there is a quiet hour. That works precisely because there is no weekday schedule to plan around — the tier you choose is the only variable.

A few practical signals help you choose on the day. If you have only a few minutes and want to finish, the easy board is the honest choice. If a hard board has beaten you two days running, drop to medium for a few days rather than grinding: the medium tier is where the useful habits are cheapest to practise, because the board is small enough that a wrong placement shows itself quickly. If you have been finishing the medium board comfortably, the jump to hard is real but it is mostly a jump in size, and size is something a method handles. The measured guide to NYT Pips hard boards sets out that method step by step, and the strategy page covers the techniques that carry across every tier.

One more thing the monthly table suggests: if you started on the hard tier near the launch and have stayed there, your sense of what a hard board “should” feel like is calibrated to smaller boards than the ones being published now. Feeling slower on the hard board than you did months ago is not evidence that you have got worse. The board under your hands has more squares and more regions than it used to, and the comparison you are making against your own memory is not a like-for-like one.

Finally, a tier is not a commitment for the whole session. Nothing stops you opening the hard board, reading it for a minute, and deciding to play the medium one first. Reading the hard board before you are ready to solve it is not wasted time: by the time you come back to it, you will already have noticed where the small exact sums and the all-equal regions sit, which is most of the opening work.

What does our daily board do differently from the Times'?

Our daily board makes its hard tier harder in a different way: the Times builds difficulty mostly out of size and dense arithmetic, while our generator builds it out of looser constraints and more doubles on a smaller board. Both sides are measured from the boards themselves — the Times' figures from its published puzzle data (measured 2026-10-17), ours from every board in our own archive (measured 2026-09-02).

Start with size. A Times hard board averages 26.4 squares and 14.5 regions; an EnergyPips hard board averages 20 squares and 6.8 regions. At the easy end the gap is much smaller — 9.9 squares against 8 — so the two diverge mainly at the top. Size alone, then, is not where our hard tier gets its difficulty.

The bigger difference is what happens to the loose regions — the ones that give you no exact number to compute from. On the Times' boards the loose share falls as difficulty rises: 40% of regions on easy, 42% on medium, but only 28% on hard, where 56% of regions carry an exact sum. A Times hard board tells you nearly everything and then asks you to keep all of it in your head at once. Ours goes the other way: 38% loose on easy, 40% on medium, 44% on hard. Our hard board tells you less, so more of the work is elimination — ruling tiles out of a region rather than computing exactly what goes in.

The badge mix differs too. The not-equal badge, where no two values in the region may match, is almost absent from the Times' boards (0% of regions on easy, 2% on hard) but is a regular on ours (29% on easy, 17% on hard). The Times, by contrast, leaves a large share of regions with no badge at all — 23% on its easy boards — while ours almost never does (1%). And our hard tray carries 3.31 doubles on average against the Times' 3.11, which matters because doubles are the tiles that make all-equal and small-sum regions work.

Two smaller differences are worth knowing. Our generator does not insist on a single solution: the win condition is covering every square while satisfying every region, and on the larger boards more than one arrangement can qualify. What it bounds is how many arrangements qualify — at most 12 on easy, 80 on medium and 400 on hard, because demanding a unique answer on a 20-square board is close to unsatisfiable — and every board is verified solvable before it is published. And our boards roll over at midnight New York time, with every past day kept and playable — which is the practical reason to use both sources. The Times' puzzle is the shared one, the board you can talk about with anyone else who played it today; ours is the one you can play again tomorrow, or play last Tuesday's, without a subscription. The EnergyPips homepage always opens on today's board.

What do you do once the day's boards are done?

You have three good options: play more boards in the same format, go back through earlier days, or study the day you just finished. Which one is right depends on whether you want more puzzle, more practice, or more understanding.

If you simply want more puzzle, Pips unlimited deals fresh boards on demand in all three difficulties, with no daily limit and no account. It is the right place for the evening when one hard board was not enough, or for practising a single tier on purpose: ten medium boards in a row will teach you more about opening moves than ten days of one medium board each, because you see the same decision repeated while it is still fresh.

If you want continuity — the feel of a dated daily puzzle, but more of them — the Pips archive holds every one of our daily boards back to August 18, 2025, three difficulties a day, all free to play. Working back through a month of hard boards is a good way to see how your reading of the board improves, because each one is a fixed puzzle you can return to. For the Times' back catalogue, our guide to the NYT Pips archive explains what the Times keeps behind its Games subscription and what this site can and cannot offer instead.

If you want to understand the day you just played, open its page in the NYT Pips answers archive even when you solved it. Each day's page profiles the three boards — size, regions, the tightest region to open on, what makes that particular board distinctive — and comparing the route you took with the region the page says to start from is the fastest feedback a daily solver can get. Doing that for a week tells you more about your habits than another week of solving alone. If a rule tripped you, the rules walk-through covers the cases that cause most mistakes, including the domino that straddles two regions.

And if you finished all three and want nothing more today, that is the point of Daily Pips. Tomorrow's boards — ours at midnight New York time, the Times' on its own schedule — will be a different size, possibly by a different constructor, and the tables on this page will include them within the hour.

Quick answers

Is the daily board on this site the New York Times puzzle?

No. The boards at /pips-game are generated and verified by EnergyPips and use the same rule vocabulary — exact sums, all-equal, not-equal, greater-than and less-than regions — but they are not the Times’ boards. For the Times’ puzzle, play it at nytimes.com/puzzles/pips; this site only publishes hints and solutions for it, after the day arrives.

When does a new daily board appear here?

Our own daily boards roll over at midnight New York time. NYT answers pages for a date go live on that date in New York, never earlier, so nothing is spoiled ahead of the day.

Does the Times make the puzzle harder on certain days of the week?

Not in any way the published data shows. Averaged over every day since launch, board size and region count differ between weekdays by less than the normal swing from one day to the next. The table on this page recomputes that every hour from the Times’ own puzzle data.