The New York Times Games division has released a solution guide for Pips, its domino-based puzzle game, covering all difficulty levels for September 11, 2026. Players struggling with the Easy, Medium, or Hard versions can now access targeted hints rather than resorting to revealing entire puzzles at once.
Launched in August 2025, Pips reimagines traditional dominoes as a single-player puzzle experience. Unlike classic domino games where matching is required, Pips incorporates color-coded spaces with specific mathematical and logical constraints. Players must arrange tiles to satisfy conditions such as summing to particular numbers, ensuring equality among values, or meeting greater-than and less-than requirements.
The game mechanics involve placing domino tiles vertically or horizontally on a grid where color-coded zones dictate puzzle rules. Partially placed tiles within these zones must still satisfy the designated conditions. Common constraints include numerical sum requirements, equality conditions where all values must match, inequality demands, and comparative operators limiting tile values within specific boundaries.
The solution guide provides progressive assistance across three difficulty tiers, offering specific tile placements and orientations for each constrained zone. This approach allows players to solve puzzles incrementally rather than abandoning progress entirely, supporting continued engagement with the daily gaming challenge.
Originally reported by Mashable →
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