About
A small, independent puzzle site: gentle hints for the daily Pips puzzle, and as many extra puzzles as you want.
Independent, not affiliated
Pips Hints is an independent fan site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The New York Times Company. Pips is a puzzle by The New York Times; the hints, explanations, solver and unlimited puzzles here are our own.
How daily hints are checked
Each day we read the published puzzle, check that the official answer obeys every region rule, and run our own solver on it. Hints and answers only appear after both checks pass; if anything looks off, the page shows “hints coming soon” instead of a guess. The hint text and step-by-step explanations are written by our own code.
How our practice puzzles are made
Every board is built by our own generator: it grows a random shape out of dominoes, assigns pips, splits the board into regions and writes a rule for each one. A solver then tries every possible way to place the dominoes. If more than one answer exists, the generator tightens a rule where the answers disagree and checks again; on Medium and Hard it then loosens rules one by one while the answer stays unique, which makes the puzzle need more reasoning. Only puzzles with exactly one answer reach you.
Daily puzzles come from the date, so everyone on the same calendar day gets the same three boards. Practice puzzles come from a random code that is part of the link, so any practice board can be shared and replayed.
Privacy-friendly by design
No account and no sign-up. Your progress, streak and times live in your own browser. See the privacy policy.