There are three NYT Pips boards for Friday, August 21, 2026: Easy, Medium, and Hard. Start with the hint for your difficulty below; the full solutions follow in a clearly marked spoiler section.
How to use these hints
Choose the board you are playing and stop before the solution section if you want to solve it yourself. The August 21 archive lists distinct boards for all three difficulties, not one board repeated at different hint levels. The board information and displayed solutions below are reported by the independent NYT Game Solver archive; it attributes the placements to NYT puzzle data, but is not the New York Times itself.
August 21 hints by difficulty
Easy
Start with the single-cell region marked <1. Its value must be 0. Use that forced value to narrow which domino can occupy the cell, then check the other half against its own region. This board has 5 dominoes and 7 regions.
Medium
Look first at the three-cell region that must sum to 8. The reported values there are 1, 5, and 2. The tray includes doubles 5–5, 0–0, and 6–6; use each region rule to decide where a half of a double can fit. This board has 7 dominoes and 7 regions.
Hard
Begin with the tightest equal, greater-than, less-than, sum, or unequal condition, then work outward as each forced half restricts neighboring cells. Keep track of which dominoes remain and verify both halves of every placed tile. The archive reports the solution values, but does not provide a dependable text coordinate map for all tile placements, so exact placements are not reproduced here.
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What changes across the three boards
The archive reports the following board metadata and constraint mix for August 21:
| Difficulty | Board size | Dominoes | Regions and constraints |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 4×4 | 5 | 7 regions; includes open single cells, a single-cell <1 region, a single-cell >4 region, and equal-value regions. |
| Medium | 4×5 | 7 | 7 regions; includes a cell >3, a three-cell sum of 8, equal-value regions, an open cell, and less-than regions. |
| Hard | 10×7 | 16 | 15 regions; uses equal, greater-than, less-than, sum, and unequal constraints. |
These are puzzle-specific counts and dimensions reported by the archive, not general statistics about Pips. The separate date guide also lists August 21 constraints and recommends solving from restrictive regions outward: Anagrammer’s August 21 hints.
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How Pips works
Pips is a digital domino-placement logic puzzle. Place every supplied domino so its two halves fill board cells, rotating tiles as needed, and satisfy the condition shown in each colored region. Depending on the region, values may need to sum to a target, match, differ, or meet a greater-than or less-than limit. NYT Games offers Easy, Medium, and Hard boards. A concise description of the goal from Tom’s Guide writer Kaycee Hill is: “The objective is straightforward: place all available dominoes on the board while ensuring each colored region meets its specified condition.” See Tom’s Guide’s Pips rules and controls. Pips is played digitally through NYT Games online or its app; a physical domino set is not established as necessary.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Spoiler: August 21 answers
Stop here if you do not want the full solution values. The independent archive displays solution values for the date’s boards and identifies the set with puzzle editor Ian Livengood. For Easy and Medium, use the board images and values in the archive entry; the text listing does not establish a complete placement map in this article. For Hard, the archive likewise reports solution values but its text does not reliably expose exact tile positions and orientations. Because a misplaced coordinate or orientation would be misleading, no complete tile-by-tile placement is claimed here.
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