Pips Hints for Today's NYT Boards

How to take a hint without wrecking the board

A hint is only worth taking if the puzzle is still yours afterwards. These are the habits that keep it that way.

1. Decide what kind of stuck you are. There are two. Either you have no idea where to begin, or you have placed most of the tray and the last few tiles refuse to fit. The first is what hint 1 is for. The second usually means an earlier placement is wrong, and no hint about where to start will fix it — undo back to the last tile you were certain of instead.
2. Open one disclosure, then close the tab. Read hint 1, go back to the board, and give it a real attempt before you return. Reading all three in one glance turns a nudge into a walkthrough, and the board stops being a puzzle.
3. Use the hint to start a chain, not to place a tile. Hint 1 tells you which region carries the most information. The value comes from asking what that region forces next door: which tile has to cover it, what the other half of that tile must be, and which neighbouring region that other half lands in.
4. Read hint 2 against your own tray. It lists the doubles and says whether the board has all-equal or all-different regions for them to fit or be barred from. Before you open hint 3, count those regions yourself and mark which doubles have only one possible home.
5. Treat hint 3 as a check, not a gift. It gives the values in one region and nothing about which half of which domino supplies them. If you had already guessed those values, you now know your reasoning was sound — keep going from there without opening anything else.
6. Open the full solution for one board, not three. The answer link on each card jumps to that difficulty only. If the hard board beat you, there is no reason to see the medium board's answer too.
7. Look at the answer for the region you were stuck on, then stop. The answers page lists the solution region by region. Find the one that blocked you, read its values, and return to the board to place the rest yourself.

What each hint gives away

Where the three hints come from

None of these hints is written by hand. Each one is computed from the board's published data by the same code that builds our answers pages, and I can describe exactly what that code does, because the method is the whole point of a graduated hint: it should tell you what a careful solver would notice first, not what the answer happens to be.

Hint 1: the region with the fewest ways to be filled

Every region gets a freedom score. The code lists every possible collection of pip values the region could hold — values run from blank (0) to six, and order does not matter, so a two-square region has 28 possible collections — and counts how many of them satisfy the region's rule on their own, ignoring the rest of the board. A two-square region that must add up to 6 can hold 0 and 6, 1 and 5, 2 and 4, or 3 and 3: a score of 4. A two-square region that must add up to 12 can only hold two sixes: a score of 1. A two-square all-equal region scores 7, one for each value, and a two-square all-different region scores 21. Regions with no rule are left out entirely, since they carry no information to start from.

The opening hint points at the region with the lowest score. When two regions tie, the smaller one wins. That tie-break matters more than it sounds, because any single square with an exact target scores 1 — there is only one value it can be — and so does a single square under a comparison that only one value can meet, such as more than 5. Across the 1,272 boards measured on this site, the opening region was a single square on 78% of them, and was fully forced — exactly one possible filling — on 77%. A forced single square is the most certain square on the board, though not always the most productive one; the productive move is to ask which domino covers it and what that tells you about its neighbour.

One limit worth knowing: the count only runs on regions of eight squares or fewer. Larger regions are vanishingly rare in the published puzzles, and the hint text describes one without a number rather than printing a meaningless figure.

Hint 2: what the tray forces

The second hint ignores the grid and reads your tray. It lists every double — a tile whose two halves match — because doubles are the most constrained tiles you can be dealt. A double cannot sit wholly inside an all-different region, since its two halves would repeat a value, and it is the only kind of tile that can sit wholly inside an all-equal region. The hint counts both kinds of region on the day's board and tells you which of those consequences applies. When a tray carries no doubles at all — 13% of the boards measured — the hint says so and gives the tray's total pip count instead, which is useful for checking a set of sum regions against what you actually hold.

Hint 3: the values, without the tiles

The third hint goes back to the opening region from hint 1, looks it up in the published solution, and gives you the values that land there, sorted from low to high. It deliberately leaves out which domino supplies each value and which way round that domino sits, which is usually where the real decision is. Be aware of its weak case: when the opening region is a single square with an exact target, the value is simply the target, and hint 3 repeats what the badge already said. On those days, the tray hint is your last genuine nudge before the solution page.

Why is the hard board so much harder to start?

Because it is a different size of problem, not a vaguer version of the easy one. The figures below come from our measurement of every board the Times published between August 18, 2025 and October 15, 2026 — 1,272 boards across 424 days.

The average easy board covers 9.9 squares in 6 regions; the average medium covers 14.7 in 8.3; the average hard covers 26.4 in 14.5. That is not a gentle ramp. A hard board asks you to keep track of more than twice as many placements as an easy one, and a wrong tile placed early can sit under a lot of correct-looking work before the board tells you something is off. That is exactly the situation where a starting-point hint saves the most time, because the cost of a bad opening grows with the board.

The surprise is in the rules. You might expect harder boards to hand you fewer exact numbers, but the opposite is true: 56% of hard-board regions are exact sums, against 39% on easy and 35% on medium. Loose regions — comparisons, all-different and no-rule regions — make up 28% of a hard board on average, against 40% on easy. So the hard board is not hard because it withholds numbers. It is hard because there are so many of them that it is no longer obvious which one to start from. That is precisely the question hint 1 answers.

Doubles rise with difficulty too: an average of 3.11 per hard tray against 1.31 per easy tray. More doubles means more forced placements if you look for them, which is why the tray hint tends to be most useful on the hard board. And the hard tier holds the extremes: its largest region measured 16 squares, and its highest sum target was 63. Those boards are dissected on our NYT Pips hard page.

The easy board fails people in a different way. With 23% of its regions carrying no rule at all, it can feel as if there is nothing to reason from. If hint 1 on an easy board names a square you had already spotted, go straight to hint 2: in a tray that small, knowing where each double can and cannot go is the next-firmest footing you have.

Getting yourself unstuck before you open anything

The hints above automate a routine you can run by hand, and running it yourself is the better result: the board stays yours. Here is the same reasoning in the order I would apply it.

Find the forced squares first. Scan for single squares with an exact number on them, and for two-square sums at the very ends of the range: a sum of 0 must be two blanks, a sum of 12 must be two sixes, a sum of 1 must be a blank and a one. These are the regions hint 1 is built to find, and they cost nothing to spot. Write the values in mentally before you touch a tile.

Then follow the tile across the border. A forced square is half of a domino, and the other half sits in a neighbouring square. Look at the tray: which tiles carry the forced value? If only one does, its other half is now known, and so is something about the region next door. This step is where the chain begins, and it is the step people most often skip.

Work out where the doubles cannot go. Every all-different region is a no-go zone for a double lying wholly inside it. Every all-equal region of two squares needs either a double or two tiles that happen to share a value at their meeting edge. Listing these exclusions usually leaves one or two doubles with a single legal home.

Check for an orphan square. Every domino covers two adjacent squares, so a square boxed in on all sides by squares you have already filled can never be covered. If your next placement would leave one, it is wrong, however well it fits the region it lands in.

Leave the comparisons for last. A less-than or greater-than region constrains the total, not each value, so it allows many fillings and rarely tells you where to begin. Once the exact sums around it are settled, a comparison often resolves itself.

If you have run through all five and are still stuck, that is the honest moment to open hint 1. The fuller version of this method, with worked examples on boards of our own, is in our Pips strategy guide; if any of the badges themselves are unclear, the Pips rules page defines each one, and how to play NYT Pips walks through the Times' version from the first tile.

What these hints are, and are not

EnergyPips is an independent site and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to The New York Times. The puzzle data — the grid, the regions, the tray and the solution — is the Times' own, published each day; the hints are our own derivation from that published solution, and every board is re-checked against its stored answer before anything about it appears here. We do not reproduce the boards to play, and we make no claim about what help, if any, the Times' own app offers. Credits follow the puzzle data exactly: the editor is credited for the day, and each board's constructor is credited on that board's card, because the three boards of one day are often built by different people.

Nothing on this page predicts tomorrow. A day's hints appear only once that date has arrived in New York. If you would rather play a domino puzzle with no hints needed and nothing to look up, the free daily board on our homepage is one of our own making, in the same three difficulties, with a full archive behind it.

Questions about Pips hints

Do these Pips hints give away the answer?

Not unless you open all three and then follow the link. Hint 1 names a region and explains why it is the place to begin, with no values. Hint 2 describes the doubles in your tray and what they rule in or out, still with no placements. Hint 3 gives the values in the opening region only, without saying which domino supplies them. The full solution is on a separate answers page, one click further on.

When do the hints for a new day appear?

A day becomes readable here once its date has arrived in New York. Puzzle data is fetched ahead of time, but nothing dated after today in New York is shown, listed or linked, so the hints can never spoil a board you have not had the chance to play yet. The page refreshes itself at least once an hour.

Are these the official New York Times hints?

No. EnergyPips is not affiliated with The New York Times. Every hint on this page is our own derivation, computed from the published solution by code that ranks the regions, reads the tray and then looks up one region’s values. This page makes no claim either way about hint features inside the Times’ own app.

Why does hint 1 so often point at a single square?

Because the ranking counts how many combinations of values could fill each region, and a one-square region with an exact target can only be filled one way. Ties go to the smaller region. Across the 1,272 boards measured, the opening region was a single square on 78% of them.

What if hint 3 just repeats the number on the badge?

That happens when the opening region is a single square with an exact target: its value is the target, so hint 3 adds nothing new. In that case treat hint 2 as your last real nudge and either go back to the board or open the full solution for the one region you are stuck on.

Can I get hints for an older day?

Yes. Every past date has its own answers page with the same three hints per board, behind the same disclosures, above the full solution. The six most recent earlier days are linked from this page, and the complete list is in the NYT Pips answers archive.

Which board should I take a hint on first?

Usually the hard one, and not out of pride. The average hard board measured here runs 26.4 squares against 9.9 on easy, so a stall on hard costs more time, and a correct starting region saves more of it.