NYT Pips Hints (November 4, 2026)

The one instruction the game gives

The game's How to Play text comes down to a single sentence, and every hint on this page serves it. A board is finished when the tray is empty and every badge is satisfied, not when it matches a particular picture. The hints help you get there one placement at a time.

That is why the hints describe placements and region totals and never say "the answer is". On a board with more than one valid arrangement, any arrangement that meets every condition follows that instruction. The hints point to the Times' own solution only because it is the one the data contains.

Place all the dominoes within the board to satisfy the conditions.— Pips, How to Play text in the Times' game code (read 29 October 2026)

Three steps, each behind its own reveal

Each board above has three reveals, and nothing opens unless you click it. "Show a starting domino" gives one domino and the two cells it covers, plus the reason it is a good place to start. "Show what every region holds" lists each region's numbers without saying which domino supplies them. "Show the solved board" draws the finished board.

Use them in that order. The first step usually unlocks a chain of forced moves, the second checks a guess without giving away the dominoes, and the third is for when you want to see it finished.

How the starting domino is chosen

The starting domino is picked by a fixed rule, not by hand. If the board has a one-cell region with an exact sum, the hint gives the domino covering that cell, because that half has only one possible value. Failing that, it uses a one-cell region with any condition. If there is none, it gives the first domino of the Times' own solution. In the 33 days to 29 October 2026, one-cell regions made up 48% of easy, 51% of medium and 73% of hard regions, so the first rule almost always applies.

Each hint names the cells by row and column from the top-left, R1C1, the same notation the answers page uses.

Reading the unsolved board

The unsolved boards here show every region's colour and badge exactly as the data defines them. Thick lines mark region borders, and pale cream cells belong to empty regions. A badge with a plain number is a sum, <N and >N are totals below or above N, = means all cells match, and ≠ means all cells differ.

The tray is not drawn. Open the game alongside, or use the domino counts in each heading (Easy, 5 dominoes, and so on) to check you are on the right board.

A hint for each kind of condition

Before you open a reveal, try the question that fits the badge you are stuck on.

A worked hint: the medium board of 29 October 2026

This is how to reason towards a starting point without a reveal. The medium tray that day held 6–3, 5–0, 6–6, 1–6, 2–0, 1–2 and 6–4, and the board had a four-cell region marked =.

An equal region needs one value on every cell, so start by counting halves. Across the seven dominoes, 6 appears five times (on 6–3, both halves of 6–6, 1–6 and 6–4). Every other value appears at most twice. Only 6 occurs often enough to fill four cells, so the equal region must be all 6s before you place anything.

The one-cell region at R4C4 is marked "less than 1", so it is a blank. The cell at R2C2 is "more than 3", which leaves 4, 5 or 6. The three-cell column at the left sums to 3. Those three facts plus the four 6s settle most of the board, and the rest follows from which dominoes are still in the tray. On this board the 1–2 domino can lie either way round inside its "less than 5" region. That is the second valid arrangement our solver found.

When one domino fills a whole region

A two-cell region can be covered by one domino or split between two. If a two-cell sum is 10 and only one tile in the tray, 4–6, adds to 10, try laying that tile across the region before you try splitting it. On the 29 October 2026 easy board it was the other way round: the 10 came from two different dominoes, the 4 of the 0–4 and the 6 of the 1–6. Neither pattern is a rule, so check both.

A quick test settles it. If the two cells of the region lie side by side and a single tray domino matches the target, that domino can cover the region. If the cells are not adjacent, or no single domino fits, the region must be split between two dominoes, and each of those dominoes reaches into a neighbouring region. Knowing which case you are in tells you which neighbours to look at next.

Counting halves, the habit that solves most boards

Before opening any reveal, list how many times each value from 0 to 6 appears in the tray. No board in the game's history has repeated a domino, but values repeat across dominoes all the time, and the counts often decide a region on their own:

• A value that appears once has only one possible domino, so wherever it must go, that domino goes.
• An equal region of N cells needs a value with at least N halves in the tray.
• A not-equal region of N cells needs N different values, so with few distinct values left, it fills last.
• If two regions both need a 6 and the tray has only two 6s, both 6s are spoken for, and every other region must avoid them.
• Doubles (3.07 per hard board on average since launch) fill two cells of one value at once. They often belong in equal regions or in two-cell sums of an even number.

Medium and hard: where to look first

On recent hard boards nearly three regions in four are single cells, so solve them like a sudoku. Write down every fixed half first, then see which dominoes those halves rule out. Medium boards in the same period used more comparisons, with greater-than and less-than together making up 35% of regions. A run of "more than" badges usually means the high tiles (5s and 6s) are spoken for early.

Why some hints may not match your board

Some boards have more than one valid arrangement: in our solver's check, 26 of 33 medium boards in the window had a second one. Hints always follow the Times' own solution. If a revealed region total differs from yours but your numbers still meet the condition, you may simply have a different valid arrangement.

When the hints are not up yet

HintSheet publishes each date's boards at midnight Eastern. Until then this page shows the most recent date it has, labelled with that date, so you never take yesterday's hints for today's. Every earlier date is in the Pips archive, and the full solutions are on the answers page.

Other puzzles with step-by-step hints

Hints pages on the same pattern exist for Connections, Strands, Wordle and the Mini Crossword. For more region logic, try LinkedIn's Queens and Tango.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Pips answers

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