Yesterday's Pips: The Times' Three Boards and Ours

People come back for a day-old puzzle for three reasons

A daily puzzle is built around the idea that everyone gets the same board on the same day and then it is gone. That rhythm is most of the appeal, and it is also why yesterday is one of the most common things people ask for. The requests fall into three groups, and each wants something slightly different from this page.

You missed the day

Travel, a busy evening, a phone left at home. If you keep your own run of consecutive days, a single gap feels like a bigger loss than it is, and the natural response is to go back and do the missed board. For the Times' boards, that means reading the answers page in order — hint one, hint two, hint three — and stopping as soon as you can see the way, which is the closest thing to solving it cold that is available without the original board in front of you. For a board you can actually place tiles on, our own puzzle from the same date is right beside it in the table above.

You finished, but are not sure

Comparison regions are the usual culprit. A board can look complete, with every square covered, and still have a less-than region that only just passes or an all-equal region whose values you never actually checked. Yesterday's answer is the cheapest way to settle the doubt, and the checklist further down is the fastest way to use it without reading more of the solution than you need.

You got stuck and want to know why

This is the most useful of the three. A board that beat you is a board that taught you something, but only if you find out which region you misread or which tile you placed too early. That is why the answers on this site come region by region rather than as a single picture: the region where your values differ from the answer is the place your reasoning went wrong, and it is usually one region, not the whole board.

The October 15, 2026 boards sit against 424 measured days

A single board means little on its own. Whether it was big, or vague, or unusually kind with its doubles only shows up against the rest of the run, so the lines below compare each of the Times' boards from yesterday with the average for its tier, measured across 1,272 boards published between August 18, 2025 and October 15, 2026. On that measure an easy board averages 9.9 squares, a medium 14.7 and a hard 26.4; the hard tier averages 3.11 doubles per tray against 1.31 on easy, and 28% of its regions are loose — comparisons or unconstrained — against 40% on easy.

Taken as a set, yesterday ran from 10 squares on easy to 22 on hard, a spread of 12; across the measured run the average spread between the two tiers is 16.5 squares.

The Times keeps its back catalogue behind a subscription

Once a day has passed, the Times' own board for it lives in the New York Times Games back catalogue, which is part of a Games subscription. There is no free public archive of past NYT Pips boards by date, and nothing the Times has published says one is planned — so a page promising one is either describing the subscription or describing something else. The NYT Pips archive page goes through what that means in practice and what the alternatives are.

What this site does with those days is narrower and deliberate. Each published date gets an answers page built from the Times' own data for that day: a profile of each board, three hints that give away progressively more, and the full solution region by region. The boards themselves are described, not reproduced — you cannot play a Times board here, and that is a line the site keeps on purpose. If you want to play the original, the official NYT Pips page is where it lives.

The credits are reported exactly as the feed gives them, and they are worth reading correctly. Each board names its constructor — the person who built that grid — and each day names an editor. They are separate jobs, and the three boards of a single day are often by different constructors. In the measured run, Rodolfo Kurchan is credited with 685 boards, Ian Livengood is credited with 503 boards, Heidi Erwin is credited with 83 boards, (uncredited in the feed) is credited with 1 boards, and Ian Livengood is the editor on 424 days. None of that is a biography: the feed names people, it does not describe them, and this page does not either.

Our own boards never expire, yesterday's included

The other half of this page is a puzzle you can actually play. EnergyPips publishes three boards of its own every day — easy, medium and hard — generated by this site's engine and checked to have exactly one solution before they go up. They follow the same idea as the Times' puzzle: lay dominoes so that every coloured region meets its condition. They are not copies of the Times' boards, and the grids, trays and targets are different. Nothing is removed once it is published, so yesterday's board is still at the same address next month and next year.

Our boards are smaller than the Times', most of all on hard, which matters if you are switching between the two. Measured over 1,143 of our boards, an easy one averages 8 squares, a medium 14 and a hard 20, against the Times' 9.9, 14.7 and 26.4. Our hard trays carry 3.31 doubles on average. Our generator also leans much harder on the all-different rule — 22% of our regions use it, against 1% of the Times' — while the Times uses far more unconstrained squares. A solve that felt easy on one and hard on the other may simply reflect that difference in rule mix.

Our October 15, 2026 set, specifically: the easy board has 8 squares, level with our easy average of 8; the medium board has 14 squares, level with our medium average of 14; the hard board has 20 squares, level with our hard average of 20.

To replay any past board, the pips archive lists every date by month, and the past pips games page suggests orders that teach more than clicking dates at random. Each board page has its own hints and a verified answer diagram for every difficulty, and your placements save in your browser per date and per difficulty, so a half-finished board is waiting where you left it. That saving is local to the browser: clearing site data clears it, and it does not follow you to another device. And for today's board rather than yesterday's, the homepage always opens on the current date.

A wrong solve is almost always one region, and you can find it

Checking a solve against yesterday's answer works best if you do it in the order that gives the least away. The answers here are laid out region by region for exactly this reason: you can compare one region at a time, stop at the first disagreement, and go back to the board with only that one fact in hand. The tile-by-tile placement list comes last, because it is the full spoiler and you rarely need it.

Checking your solve against yesterday's answer

1. Write down the values you placed in each region before you open anything, so the comparison is honest.
2. Open the answer and check the exact-sum regions first. A sum is right or wrong with no room for interpretation, and a wrong one usually explains the rest.
3. Check the all-equal regions next: every value in one must match, so a single mismatched half shows immediately.
4. Check the comparison regions last. A less-than or greater-than region can be satisfied by more than one set of values, so a different set from the answer is not automatically wrong — re-add your own and test it against the badge.
5. Only if every region agrees and you still doubt it, open the placement list and compare tile by tile. If every region on your board meets its badge, your solve stands, whichever tiles you used to get there.

Step four is the one most people skip. The comparison badges constrain a region's total, not each value in it, so two players can fill the same less-than region differently and both satisfy the badge on its own. What decides it is the rest of the board: the tiles you used there have to leave the right tiles for everything else. That is also why the empty, rule-free regions deserve attention when you review a solve — they look like free space, and they are where the leftover values of a wrong placement quietly end up.

For our own boards the check is simpler, because you can do it on the board itself. Open yesterday's puzzle — your saved placements come back automatically in the same browser — and the board marks it solved only when every square is covered and every region is satisfied; the answer diagram sits underneath for when you want to see it.

Questions about yesterday's puzzle

Where can I find the answers to yesterday’s NYT Pips?

Yesterday’s answers — October 15, 2026 — are on this page behind a disclosure for each difficulty, and in full, with three graduated hints first, at energypips.com/nyt-pips-answers/2026-10-15. Every earlier date since August 18, 2025 has its own answers page too.

Can I play yesterday’s New York Times Pips puzzle for free?

The Times keeps its back catalogue behind a New York Times Games subscription, and there is no free public archive of past NYT Pips boards by date. This site reports and explains the solution to each published board but does not reproduce the Times’ boards to play. What you can play free here is our own board for the same date, which stays playable permanently.

Who made yesterday’s NYT Pips boards?

The feed credits a constructor on each board and an editor on the day, and they are different credits. Yesterday: easy by Ian Livengood, medium by Ian Livengood, hard by Rodolfo Kurchan; the day was edited by Ian Livengood.

When does yesterday’s puzzle change over?

This page counts days by the calendar date in New York — the same clock both the answers section and our own archive use — and re-checks every hour. Within an hour of midnight Eastern time, today’s boards become yesterday’s here.

Is yesterday’s EnergyPips board the same as the NYT one?

No. Our boards are generated by this site’s own engine and verified to have a single solution; none is a copy of anyone else’s puzzle. They share the rules of the genre — dominoes placed so every region meets its condition — but the grids, regions and trays are different.

How far back can I go?

Both halves of this page reach back to August 18, 2025. Our own archive has 425 dates on it, today included, all playable; the NYT answers section covers 425 published days.