How do you play NYT Pips?

You place every domino from your tray onto the grid so that each square is covered exactly once and every coloured region satisfies the rule on its badge — an exact sum, all values equal, all values different, or a less-than / greater-than bound on the region total.

Where do I play NYT Pips?

On the New York Times Games site. It publishes three boards a day — easy, medium and hard — with limited free access and the back catalogue reserved for Games subscribers.

Partly. The Times offers limited free access to its daily puzzles; full access and the archive sit behind a Games subscription. This site publishes its own free daily board in the same format if you want one without a subscription.

What do the symbols on NYT Pips mean?

A number after an equals sign is an exact sum for that region. A bare equals sign means every value in the region must match. The ≠ badge means no two values may match. Less-than and greater-than constrain the region’s total rather than each value.

How much harder is the hard board?

Measured across all 389 published days, a hard board averages 26.2 squares against an easy board's 9.9 — roughly two and a half times the size. What is surprising is that it is not vaguer: its share of loose regions actually falls, from 40% to 29%.

Can a domino cross between two regions?

Yes, and this is the rule that catches people out. A domino covers two adjacent squares, and nothing requires both to be in the same region. When it straddles a boundary, each half counts toward its own region only — the tile is not in a region, its halves are.

Why does my board look impossible?

Almost always one of two things. Either a domino straddling a region boundary has been counted whole into one region rather than half into each, or an earlier placement left a square with no empty neighbour — which makes the board provably unfinishable, so the fix is backwards rather than forwards.

Do I have to solve it in one sitting?

No, and on a hard board it is usually the wrong approach. Progress is kept as you go, and the boards reward fresh eyes far more than persistence — a stuck position at twenty minutes is often obvious at first glance the next morning.

Is there an official NYT Pips archive?

Not as a free public page you can browse by date. That is why the question keeps getting asked, and it has its own page here explaining what the Times does offer.

How to Play NYT Pips

How to play NYT Pips, in one sentence: place every domino from your tray onto the grid so each square is covered exactly once and every coloured region satisfies the rule printed on it. Everything else is detail — but the detail is where people get stuck, and one rule in particular accounts for most of it.

What follows is the rule set, then something you will not find elsewhere: what the boards actually do, measured across all 389 days the Times has published, rather than described from a handful of them.

By Sukie · Puzzle editor

Published September 11, 2026

The badges

Each coloured region carries one badge, and it constrains the pip values that end up inside it — never the dominoes themselves.

= 9: The values in this region must add up to exactly nine. The commonest badge by a distance, and the one that gives you something to calculate from.
=: Every value in this region must be the same number. Note the difference from the badge above: no number attached means identity, not a total. This is the single most misread piece of notation in the game.
≠: No two values in this region may match. It constrains values, not tiles — two different dominoes can each contribute a 4 and break it.
< 8: The region total must come to less than eight. A bound rather than a target, so it narrows without pinning.
> 4: The region total must exceed four. Same character as less-than: useful late, nearly useless first.
no badge: No rule at all. Free squares, useful as somewhere to park a value nothing else will take.

The rule nobody reads carefully

A domino covers two adjacent squares. Nothing says both squares must belong to the same region. When a tile straddles a boundary, each half counts toward its own region and only its own — so a 6-1 lying across a border contributes a six to one region and a one to the other.

Almost every “this board is broken” moment traces back to this. Someone adds a whole tile into a region that contains only half of it, gets a total that cannot be made to work, and concludes the puzzle is wrong. The region does not contain tiles. It contains squares, and each square carries one number.

The order that works

Bound every exact-sum region: a region of k squares can hold 0 to 6k.
Place or rule out the doubles — they are the most constrained tiles you hold.
Fill whichever region is now forced.
Check for a square with no empty neighbour before continuing.
Only then touch a less-than or greater-than region.

What the difficulties actually do

Puzzle sites describe difficulty; almost nobody measures it. These figures come from every board the Times has published — 389 days, 1,167 boards, collected and re-solved from their own solution data.

NYT Pips boards by difficulty, measured 2026-09-10.
Difficulty	Squares	Regions	Doubles	Loose regions
easy	9.9	6	1.32	40%
medium	14.8	8.3	1.8	42%
hard	26.2	14.2	3.12	29%

The hard board is 26.2 squares against easy's 9.9 — two and a half times the size. But look at the last column. The share of regions that give you no exact number to work from falls, from 40% to 29%. The hard board is more tightly specified than the easy one.

That is a deliberate and quite humane design choice, and it tells you how to approach it: you are never being asked to guess, only to keep more in your head at once. If a hard board feels impossible, the information you need is on it — the problem is bookkeeping, not deduction.

Two more things fall out of the data. The ≠ badge is nearly absent from the Times' boards — 0% of regions on easy, 2% on hard — while the all-equal badge runs at 21% and 17%. And 23% of regions on an easy board carry no rule at all. An easy board is not easy because its rules are gentle; it is easy because a quarter of it has no rules to satisfy.

The arithmetic is smaller than you think

Across 5,081 exact-sum regions in the published run, the median target is 4 and the commonest is 4. That is lower than almost anyone guesses. The full range runs from 0 to 63, but the mass of it sits low.

This is worth internalising because it changes what you look for. A target of four across two squares has very few fillings — 0+4, 1+3, 2+2 — and each of those is a strong constraint on your tray. Large targets feel intimidating and are usually easier, because a high number across several squares forces big values and there are only so many sixes in a double-six set.

The practical rule that falls out: work the extremes first, at either end. A very low target and a very high one are both nearly forced. A middling target across three or four squares is where the real freedom lives, and it is the last thing you should try to pin down.

One person makes all of them

A small thing the data settles that no single day's puzzle could: the same constructor is credited on all 389 days measured here, without a break since the game launched. Whatever else this puzzle is, it is one person's sustained work rather than a rota or an algorithm.

That consistency is probably why the difficulty calibration holds up as well as it does across a year of boards. It also explains the house style the numbers show — the near-total absence of the ≠ badge, the heavy use of all-equal regions, the willingness to leave a quarter of an easy board unconstrained. Those are choices, and they are the same choices every day.

A worked opening on a typical board

Abstract advice is easy to agree with and hard to use, so here is the routine applied to a shape the Times produces constantly: a medium board with a two-square = 11, a three-square all-equal region, and a couple of comparison regions around them.

Bound the sum first. Two squares can hold anything from 0 to 12. A target of 11 admits exactly one pair of values — a five and a six. Not probably: only. Two squares of the board are settled before you have touched a tile, even though you do not yet know which way round they sit.

Then the all-equal region. Three squares that must all show the same number means the whole region resolves to one value, so your only real decision is which. Check your tray: three squares of sixes needs three halves carrying a six, and there are only eight sixes in a double-six set. Walk the seven candidate values that way and the region usually collapses to two options.

Only then the comparisons. By this point most of their squares have been decided by their neighbours anyway, which is exactly why they are worth leaving. A > 4 that looked shapeless at the start is often already satisfied by the time you reach it.

Notice how little placing happened. A lot of reading, then a burst of forced moves — that ratio is what a fast solve actually looks like, and it is close to the opposite of how most people play at first.

Where to play it

The official puzzle is at The New York Times, which publishes three boards a day with limited free access and the back catalogue behind a Games subscription. If you get stuck on one, the answers and hints section here covers every day it has run, hints first.

If what you want is simply more of this format without a subscription, this site publishes its own daily board in the same rule vocabulary — 381 dates deep, every one verified solvable, free. Today's is here. They are our boards, not the Times', and nothing on this site reproduces theirs.

Common questions

How do you play NYT Pips?: You place every domino from your tray onto the grid so that each square is covered exactly once and every coloured region satisfies the rule on its badge — an exact sum, all values equal, all values different, or a less-than / greater-than bound on the region total.
Where do I play NYT Pips?: On the New York Times Games site. It publishes three boards a day — easy, medium and hard — with limited free access and the back catalogue reserved for Games subscribers.
Is NYT Pips free?: Partly. The Times offers limited free access to its daily puzzles; full access and the archive sit behind a Games subscription. This site publishes its own free daily board in the same format if you want one without a subscription.
What do the symbols on NYT Pips mean?: A number after an equals sign is an exact sum for that region. A bare equals sign means every value in the region must match. The ≠ badge means no two values may match. Less-than and greater-than constrain the region’s total rather than each value.
How much harder is the hard board?: Measured across all 389 published days, a hard board averages 26.2 squares against an easy board's 9.9 — roughly two and a half times the size. What is surprising is that it is not vaguer: its share of loose regions actually falls, from 40% to 29%.
Can a domino cross between two regions?: Yes, and this is the rule that catches people out. A domino covers two adjacent squares, and nothing requires both to be in the same region. When it straddles a boundary, each half counts toward its own region only — the tile is not in a region, its halves are.
Why does my board look impossible?: Almost always one of two things. Either a domino straddling a region boundary has been counted whole into one region rather than half into each, or an earlier placement left a square with no empty neighbour — which makes the board provably unfinishable, so the fix is backwards rather than forwards.
Do I have to solve it in one sitting?: No, and on a hard board it is usually the wrong approach. Progress is kept as you go, and the boards reward fresh eyes far more than persistence — a stuck position at twenty minutes is often obvious at first glance the next morning.
Is there an official NYT Pips archive?: Not as a free public page you can browse by date. That is why the question keeps getting asked, and it has its own page here explaining what the Times does offer.

Or go back to today's pips puzzle.