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Spoilers ahead. This guide covers the NYT Pips puzzle for Saturday, February 21, 2026. Start with the rule reminder and progressive hints below; the complete Hard walkthrough and the source-reported Easy and Medium placements follow.
How Pips works
Pips is a digital domino puzzle played on a grid of colored regions. Place the supplied dominoes to fill the board while meeting each region’s condition. Depending on the region, its halves may need to total a target, show equal or unequal pip counts, fall above or below a threshold, or meet no stated restriction. A domino can cross a boundary: only the half or halves inside a region count toward that region’s rule. Some puzzles may have more than one valid solution.
You do not need physical dominoes. If you want to solve February 21’s board yourself, pause here before the placements below.
Hints before the answers
- Work region by region, but track whole dominoes: a piece placed across a boundary contributes a different half to each region.
- Use the condition as a constraint on the cells in that color, not automatically on both ends of every domino that touches it.
- For Hard, keep the 5–2 tile aside early; the walkthrough uses it to satisfy the Orange 7 region.
Easy answers
Mashable’s published text lists the following placements by region. Its extracted list repeats a 0–6 tile in two regions, so the text alone does not establish a verified, complete board layout. The entries below preserve what that guide reports rather than silently correcting or completing it.
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- 0 region: 0–6, vertical.
- 9 region: 0–6 and 3–5, vertical.
- 5 region: 3–6, 1–0, and 5–2, vertical.
- Another 0 region: 1–0, vertical.
- Remaining 5 and 9 regions: 5–2, vertical in each.
Medium answers
Mashable’s text guide reports these region placements. One tile in the 7 region appears only as “-4” in the accessible text; its missing value is not supplied here.
- 2 region: 0–1 vertical and 1–4 horizontal.
- 7 region: “-4” horizontal and 1–3 vertical.
- Another 2 region: 1–3 vertical and 1–2 horizontal.
- Two greater-than-3 regions: 6–5 horizontal in each.
- 4 region: 1–2 horizontal and 2–0 vertical.
- 10 region: 0–10 horizontal and 0–4 vertical.
Hard walkthrough
The following sequence is Forbes’s written walkthrough for the Hard board. It is a source-reported sequence, not an independently verified playthrough. Region names refer to the colors and conditions used in that guide.
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- Keep the 5–2 domino available for the Orange 7 region. Place 0–3 from Dark Blue 0 into Pink 7, then place 4–5 from Pink 7 into Orange equality. Put 5–5 in the next two Orange equality cells, then place 5–6 from Orange equality into Dark Blue equality.
- Put 6–6 in the remaining Dark Blue equality cells, then place 5–2 in Orange 7. Complete Orange equality with 5–0 into the first Blue 7 group and 0–2 from Pink 0 down into Blue 7.
- Place 0–0 from Pink 0 into Purple 0. Put 3–1 from Blue 7 into Purple equality, then 1–1 in the remaining Purple equality cells. Move 2–3 from Blue 7 into the first free cell.
- Finish by placing 6–4 from the second free cell into Green equality, 4–1 from Green equality into the second Blue 7 group, and 5–1 in the remaining Blue 7 cells.
Sources
- Forbes: NYT Pips hints, answers and walkthrough for Saturday, February 21 — rules and Hard walkthrough.
- Yahoo Tech: NYT Pips hints, answers for February 21, 2026 — syndicated Mashable answer text for Easy, Medium and Hard.
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