NYT Pips: how the domino puzzle works, who builds it, and what 438 days of boards show

From a Canadian beta to the Games lineup

Pips entered beta in Canada on 18 April 2025 and launched to everyone on 18 August 2025. Wikipedia's history of NYT Games describes it as the second logic puzzle on the service, after Sudoku, and the first original one. The Times' puzzle data agrees on the date: the first file it serves is for 18 August 2025, and the three days before it return Not Found.

Ian Livengood is listed as editor on every one of the 438 dates up to 29 October 2026. The Times' game page sums up the idea in one line: "Find the right spot for every domino in this relaxing game for all skill levels." The three daily difficulties are how it covers all skill levels. Each is a complete, separate puzzle with its own board, tray and solution, not a harder version of the same layout.

The six region conditions

Every cell on a Pips board belongs to exactly one region, and each region has one of six condition types. The wording below is the game's own help text.

Which conditions you actually meet

The six conditions do not turn up equally often. Across all 1,314 boards, sum regions are the most common condition at every level, and on hard boards they are more than half of all regions. "Not equal" is close to a rarity: 11 regions in 438 easy boards.

The trend is clearer on recent hard boards. From 27 September to 29 October 2026, 71% of hard regions were sums and 73% of hard regions were a single cell. A one-cell sum is not really a sum: it tells you the exact number that goes there. Recent hard boards average 19.7 regions, against 14.7 over the whole history. They are built from many small, exact clues more than from a few large ones.

How big is each board?

Difficulty mostly means size. An easy board averages 4.9 dominoes, a medium 7.4 and a hard 13.2. The largest hard boards use 16 dominoes, which means 32 cells. The size ranges overlap more than the labels suggest. The biggest easy board in the history, on 1 April 2026, had ten dominoes, more than the smallest hard board, which had six.

Hard boards do not get harder through the week. The Mini Crossword grows on Saturdays, but Pips does not change with the day: average hard-board size runs from 12.8 dominoes on Wednesdays to 13.5 on Saturdays and Sundays, a spread of less than one domino.

The tray: a domino set, never a repeat

The pieces are standard double-six dominoes: each half shows 0 to 6 dots, and a blank half counts as zero. In all 1,314 boards, no board's tray contains the same domino twice. Each board draws distinct pieces from the 28 in a double-six set. That makes counting worthwhile. If the tray holds only one domino with a 6, the region that needs a 6 can only get it from that domino.

Blanks and sixes each make up roughly a seventh of all halves (14.0% and 14.4% on easy boards), which is what an even spread over seven values gives. None of the seven values is rare, so you cannot guess at one. Count the tray.

Who constructs it

Each board has its own constructor credit, and the credits divide by difficulty. Ian Livengood, the editor, built 365 of the 438 easy boards. Rodolfo Kurchan built 408 of the 438 hard boards and every hard board since December 2025. Heidi Erwin shared the early months: 27 easy, 30 medium and 26 hard boards, all between 18 August and 7 November 2025.

Medium is the mixed level: Kurchan 258, Livengood 150, Erwin 30. In the most recent 33 days (27 September to 29 October 2026), Livengood built every easy board, Kurchan every hard board, and the two split medium 13 to 20.

Solving one board: the easy Pips of 29 October 2026

The easy board for 29 October 2026 shows the method in five dominoes. The tray held 0–4, 0–5, 4–5, 3–6 and 1–6 on a ten-cell board.

Start with the tightest conditions. Two one-cell regions say "less than 1", so each must hold a blank, and the tray has exactly two blank halves (on 0–4 and 0–5). One one-cell region says "more than 5", so it needs a 6. The region at row 2, column 4 says "less than 3". With both blanks spoken for and no 2 in the tray, it must take the 1 of the 1–6 domino. That domino's 6 can only lie below it, in the two-cell region that sums to 10, so its other cell takes a 4.

Then everything follows. The 4 next to the blank at row 3 makes the 0–4 domino. The cell needing a 6 takes the 3–6, with the 3 in the empty region beside it. The remaining blank, in the top row, joins its 5 in the empty cell to its right. The 4–5 goes in the last two cells, with the 5 in the "more than 4" region. Our solver confirms that board has one solution, and it is the one the Times publishes.

What the game lets you do

The controls are simple. The game's own tutorial text says to drag a domino onto the board and tap it to rotate it. When every domino is placed but one is wrong, the game says so ("You've used every domino, but at least one is in the wrong spot") without saying which one. There is also a timer that can be paused and resumed.

Three other options appear in the game's interface text. Reveal shows the solution after a confirmation ("Reveal the puzzle?"). Past Puzzles opens earlier dates. A display setting dims or brightens the board's background. The game code also contains a preview mode and subscription prompts, so access may depend on your account. The Times does not say on the game page which boards are free, so we do not state it.

When a board has more than one answer

Not every Pips board has a single solution. HintSheet ran an exhaustive solver over the 99 boards from 27 September to 29 October 2026. It found a second arrangement that meets every condition on 9 of 33 easy boards, 26 of 33 medium boards and 23 of the 32 hard boards it finished (one hard board timed out). Usually the difference is small. A domino flipped end-for-end inside a region where order does not matter, such as a "less than 5" region holding a 1 and a 2, satisfies the condition either way.

The Times' data contains one solution per board, and that is what HintSheet shows. The game's own messages do not say whether it accepts other valid arrangements, so we make no claim either way. If your board looks complete and the game does not accept it, compare it with the published arrangement on the answers page.

Why Pips can be hard in principle

Wikipedia's article on NYT Games notes that solving Pips puzzles is NP-complete. The rules can encode problems for which no fast general-purpose method is known (see NP-completeness). It adds that this holds even if every tile is a 1–1 or a 0–0. The daily boards are built to be solvable by reasoning, so this matters less in practice than in theory, but it explains why there is no single trick that cracks every board.

How HintSheet covers Pips

Each date's three boards are read from the Times' own Pips data and re-checked against every region condition before they are published. The check has never failed on any of the 1,314 boards since launch. They go up at midnight Eastern on the puzzle's date, never earlier. Every board is drawn as an original diagram from the data, not a screenshot of the game.

The answers page shows the solved boards, every domino's position and each region's arithmetic. The hints page holds back the solution and offers a starting domino per board. The Pips archive keeps every past date. If you like region logic, Queens and Tango on LinkedIn use the same kind of reasoning on smaller grids.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Pips answers

Every past puzzle is in the Pips archive. New here? Start with the Pips guide.