NYT Pips Hints, Walkthrough And Solutions For Saturday, Oct 25

Looking for some help with today’s Pips? It’s a pretty challenging set of puzzles today, so I’m glad you’re here. Both the Medium and Hard-tier Pips are head-scratchers, but I have the answers and a helpful walkthrough below. It’s the last Saturday of October as 2025 rushes on, so let’s solve this puzzle and go about our weekend fun!

Looking for Friday’s Pips? Read our guide right here.

How To Play Pips

In Pips, you have a grid of multicolored boxes. Each colored area represents a different “condition” that you have to achieve. You have a select number of dominoes that you have to spend filling in the grid. You must use every domino and achieve every condition properly to win. There are Easy, Medium and Difficult tiers.

Here’s an example of a difficult tier Pips:

As you can see, the grid has a bunch of symbols and numbers with each color. On the far left, the three purple squares must not equal one another (hence the equal sign crossed out). The two pink squares next to that must equal a total of 0. The zig-zagging blue squares all must equal one another. You click on dominoes to rotate them, and will need to since they have to be rotated to fit where they belong.

Not shown on this grid are other conditions, such as “less than” or “greater than.” If there are multiple tiles with > or < signs, the total of those tiles must be greater or less than the listed number. It varies by grid. Blank spaces can have anything. The various possible conditions are:

• = All pips must equal one another in this group.
• ≠ All pips must not equal one another in this group.
• > The pip in this tile (or tiles) must be greater than the listed number.
• < The pip in this tile must be less than the listed number.
• An exact number (like 6) The pip must equal this exact number.
• Tiles with no conditions can be anything.

In order to win, you have to use up all your dominoes by filling in all the squares, making sure to fit each condition. Play today’s Pips puzzle here.

Today’s Pips Solutions And Walkthrough

Below are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tier Pips. After that, I’ll walk you through the Hard puzzle. Spoilers ahead.

Today’s Easy Pips

Today’s Medium Pips

Hard Pips Walkthrough And Solution

Here’s today’s Hard Pips:

Today’s Hard Pips is the word “yes” which is fitting since not too long ago we had the word “no.” The cleverest Pips was when all three difficulty-tiers spelled out the word “love.” This is a tricky Pips because there’s no obvious place to begin. My assumption is that the 0/5 domino will go in the Dark Blue 0 tile in the stem of the “Y” up into Pink >4 but we won’t start there.

Step 1

Where I got really hung up today was in the Orange 4 group in the letter “S” so I cleared the board and started there instead. Place the 1/2 domino from Orange 4 into Purple = since we’ll need a double domino for this one and can’t use the 5/5 since we need most of our 5’s for Pink 26.

Next, place the 1/1 domino in the next two Orange 4 tiles and the 1/4 domino from Orange 4 into Green 6.

Step 2

From here, place the 2/0 domino from Green 6 into Blue 0 and the o/6 domino from Blue 0 into Pink 26. Next, place the 5/2 domino from Pink 26 into Purple = and fill in the last two Purple = tiles with the 2/2 domino.

Step 3

We’ll finish out the bottom half by placing the 0/5 domino from Dark Blue 0 into Pink >4 (just like I thought) and the 4/0 domino from Green 4 into Orange ≠. The 2/4 domino will go from Purple 2 into Orange ≠ like so:

Solution

Finally, place the 0/3 domino from the free tile into Orange ≠ and the 5/1 domino from Pink 26 into the second free tile. The 1/6 domino goes from Dark Blue 1 up into Blue 12 and wrap things up with the 6/4 domino which goes from Blue 12 into the final free tile.

The strategy here was figuring out what had to be in the largest groups. Orange 4 required very small Pips and likely a double (though that wasn’t necessarily going to be the case). Purple = definitely needed a double, and I was torn for a bit on whether this would be 1’s or 2’s. I knew the 5/5 would be needed in Pink 26 since the likeliest composition there would be four 5’s and a 6. I also knew we’d need two 6’s for Blue 12.

As always, I tried to save the free tiles for last since they have the most flexibility in terms of what you can put there. That meant starting on the bottom half and finishing on the top half. All told, not a terribly tough Pips but certainly not the easiest. How did you do?

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