NYT Games Pips Explained: How to Play (2026)

Pips is one of the newer additions to NYT Games — a daily domino-placement puzzle where you drag dominoes onto a board so the pip totals in each marked region satisfy that region's rule. It's pure logic, no words involved, and closer in spirit to Sudoku than to Wordle.

What Pips actually is

Instead of letters or numbers you type, Pips gives you a set of physical-looking dominoes and a board divided into shaded regions. Each region has a constraint printed on it — a target sum, an equality rule, or a "no repeats" rule — and your job is to place every domino on the board so every region's rule is satisfied at once. It's a spatial constraint puzzle: you're not guessing values, you're figuring out an arrangement.

The difficulty comes from the fact that dominoes are two-ended. Placing one domino to satisfy one region can throw off the region on its other half, so solving Pips is really an exercise in tracking how each placement ripples across the whole board.

The core rules

1. 1Every domino must be placed exactly once. You're given a fixed set for that day's puzzle — there's no reusing or skipping pieces.
2. 2Each region has its own constraint. Common ones include: the pips in a region must sum to a specific number, all pips in a region must match, or all pips in a region must be different.
3. 3Dominoes can be rotated but not split. Both halves of a domino go onto the board together; you're deciding where, not breaking them apart.
4. 4The puzzle has exactly one valid solution. Like a well-formed Sudoku, if your arrangement satisfies every region, you're done — there's no partial credit or approximate answer.

How to approach a Pips puzzle

• Start with the most constrained regions. A region needing an exact sum with only two cells narrows your options far faster than a loosely constrained one.
• Work outward from forced placements. If only one domino combination can satisfy a tight region, place it first and let that determine what's available for its neighbours.
• Track remaining pip counts. As you place dominoes, cross off which pip values are left in your unused set — it turns guessing into elimination.
• Expect to backtrack. Because dominoes have two ends, an early placement that looks fine can conflict with a region three moves later. Undoing one placement is often faster than restarting.

Where Pips fits into the NYT Games lineup

Pips sits alongside Sudoku and Tiles as one of the Times' pure-logic puzzles, separate from the word games like Wordle, Connections and Strands. It's aimed at players who want a daily brain-teaser without any vocabulary component — a category that's grown since the Times added Sudoku and Tiles to the same app. For the full rundown of every puzzle in the app, including which ones are free, see what are NYT games.

A free alternative: Domino Regions

If you like the mechanics of Pips — dominoes, regions, constraint satisfaction — but want to play without a subscription, Domino Regions on Puzzle Theory uses the same core idea: place dominoes so each shaded region's rule checks out, with a new board every day and no account needed. It's built for exactly the audience Pips is aimed at: people who want a spatial logic puzzle rather than a word one.

The regions in Domino Regions follow the same sum-and-match logic that makes Pips satisfying, so if you've been solving Pips daily and want a second puzzle in the same genre, it's a natural next stop.

Tips specific to harder boards

Later-week Pips puzzles tend to add regions with combined constraints — a sum requirement plus a no-repeat rule in the same area — which forces you to solve two conditions with one placement. When that happens, list every domino combination that satisfies the sum first, then eliminate any that break the second rule. It's slower than eyeballing it, but far more reliable than guessing on a tightly constrained board.

If you're building a daily logic-puzzle habit, pairing Pips with a numbers-based puzzle like Sudoku rounds things out well — one leans on arithmetic constraints, the other on placement logic, and together they cover most of what makes a satisfying daily brain teaser.

The short version

Pips is NYT Games' domino-placement logic puzzle: place every domino so each region's rule is satisfied, with one valid solution per day. If you want the same mechanic without a paywall, Domino Regions delivers a fresh board daily at no cost.