How to Play Pips NYT: Domino Rules & Region Types

The rules of Pips

Each Pips board comes with a set of domino tiles — standard dominoes, so every tile shows two numbers from 0 to 6, one on each half. Your job is to place every tile on the board so that each domino covers exactly two adjacent cells, and every cell that's meant to be filled ends up covered by exactly one domino half.

The board itself is divided into shaded regions, and every region carries a constraint on the pip values placed inside it — that's the part that turns this from a jigsaw puzzle into a logic puzzle. A domino can be rotated freely, so its two numbers can sit in either cell of the pair it's placed on, but every tile in the set gets used exactly once, and there's only one arrangement that satisfies every region's constraint simultaneously.

Not every cell has to be covered, either: some regions are marked as off-limits from the start, and dominoes are never placed there. More on that in the next section.

Region constraint types, explained

Every shaded region on a Pips board enforces exactly one of six rules. Knowing which is which is most of the battle:

• Sum — the pips inside the region must add up to an exact target number, no more and no less.
• Greater than — the pips inside the region must add up to more than the stated number.
• Less than — the pips inside the region must add up to less than the stated number.
• Equals — every cell in the region must show the same pip value as every other cell in it.
• Unequal — every cell in the region must show a different pip value from every other cell in it.
• Empty — the region must be left uncovered entirely; no domino half goes here at all.

Regions range from a single cell up to several cells wide, and a region's size changes how much it actually constrains the board: a single-cell "greater than 4" region only rules out a handful of domino halves, while a five-cell "sum" region pins down almost everything that can go in it. That size-versus-constraint relationship is exactly what the solving order below is built around.

Difficulty tiers: easy, medium, hard

Every day's Pips puzzle actually ships as three separate boards — easy, medium, and hard — each with its own domino set, its own region layout, and its own solution. They aren't the same puzzle with hints removed; the hard board is a genuinely larger, more constrained layout than the easy one, typically with more dominoes and more regions packed into the grid.

Difficulty scales mainly through region count and how tightly the constraints interact, not through a bigger domino set alone — a board can be small and still be difficult if its regions leave very few valid arrangements. Working easy first, even if you don't need the practice, is still a fast way to get a feel for a given day's region mix before tackling hard.

A solving approach that actually works

1. Find the tightest regions first — usually the smallest cells with an exact "sum" or "equals" constraint, since these allow the fewest possible domino values.
2. Work outward from there. Once a tight region is filled, the dominoes you've already placed rule out values in every region that shares a cell boundary with it.
3. Leave "greater than" and "less than" regions for the middle of your solve — they narrow the field but rarely pin down an exact value on their own.
4. Treat "empty" regions as fixed information from the start, not something to solve later — knowing which cells are off-limits shrinks the board you're actually placing dominoes on.
5. Recount your remaining domino set as you go. Since every tile is used exactly once, a value that's already fully used up elsewhere can't appear again, which often solves the last few placements by elimination.

More NYT puzzle guides

Pips is one of three daily puzzles TodayHint covers. If you'd rather work with letters than numbers, see how to play Strands for the grid-tracing game and its spangram, or how to play Connections for the category-sorting puzzle and its four difficulty colors. Once the region types are familiar, the Pips answers archive holds every past puzzle across all three difficulties.