Decoding Pips: Your Daily Dose of Domino Logic from The New York Times

The New York Times Games lineup continues to expand, offering a diverse range of puzzles for all skill levels. The latest addition, Pips, launched in August 2025, challenges players with a unique visual logic puzzle centered around dominoes. This guide will explain how to play Pips, the conditions you’ll encounter, and where to find help when you’re stuck.

What is Pips?

Pips is a single-player puzzle game where the objective is to arrange a set of dominoes on a game board to fulfill specific conditions. Unlike traditional dominoes, the focus isn’t on matching numbers, but on satisfying color-coded constraints within designated regions of the board. According to the New York Times Help Center, there’s no losing – only completing the puzzle, allowing players to continue rearranging dominoes until they find the solution.

How to Play Pips: Understanding the Conditions

The core gameplay revolves around interpreting and meeting the conditions indicated by colored regions on the board. Here’s a breakdown of the common conditions you’ll encounter, as detailed by Mashable:

• Number: The sum of the pips (dots) within the colored region must equal the specified number.
• Equal: All domino halves within the region must display the same number of pips.
• Not Equal: Each domino half within the region must have a different number of pips.
• Less Than: The sum of the pips within the region must be less than the provided number.
• Greater Than: The sum of the pips within the region must be more than the provided number.
• Empty/Blank: Regions without color coding have no specific conditions.

It’s important to note that dominoes can be placed horizontally or vertically, and only a portion of a domino may fall within a colored region.

Difficulty Levels and the Cookie Trifecta

Pips offers three difficulty levels: Easy, Medium, and Hard. The New York Times Help Center notes that players can earn a “cookie” for each level by solving the puzzle under a set time – a feature known as the “Cookie Trifecta.”

Where to Play and When New Puzzles Appear

You can access Pips through the following platforms:

• nytimes.com/games/pips
• The Games app for iOS and Android
• The Play tab of the News app

New puzzles are released daily at midnight, local to the player’s time zone.

Need Help?

If you find yourself stuck, resources are available. Forbes provides daily hints and walkthroughs for the New York Times Pips puzzle. Currently, the game offers the option to reveal the entire puzzle, but this requires starting the difficulty level over.

Pips: A Growing Addition to the NYT Games Suite

Pips joins a growing collection of popular games from The New York Times, including Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, and more. As highlighted by The New York Times, the Games section aims to provide puzzles for all skill levels, offering engaging entertainment for a wide audience.