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Below are the Easy, Medium, and Hard solutions for the Thursday, September 11, 2025 NYT Pips puzzle. Spoilers follow: each section gives the placements, so skip the difficulty levels you still want to solve.
Pips is a domino-placement puzzle: place and rotate the supplied tiles so each colored region meets its condition, using every domino. Conditions can require equal or unequal values, values above or below a threshold, a specific total or value, or unrestricted cells. The three difficulty levels have separate boards and constraints; the sources do not establish a measured scale for comparing their difficulty.
The answers below are from Hindustan Times’ September 11, 2025 guide. A Hard-board entry in that guide conflicts with Forbes’ explanation; the discrepancy is called out in that section.
Easy answers
- Equal (1): Place 1–1 vertically and 1–5 vertically.
- Equal (3): Place 3–3 horizontally.
- Number (5): Place 1–5 vertically and 0–6 horizontally.
- Number (6): Place 4–6 vertically.
Medium answers
- Number (3): Place 3–4 horizontally.
- Number (14): Place 3–4 horizontally and 5–5 horizontally.
- Number (15): Place 6–6 horizontally and 3–2 vertically.
- Number (9): Place 4–4 vertically and 5–6 vertically.
- Number (6): Place 5–6 vertically.
- Number (2): Place 3–2 vertically and 3–5 vertically.
- Number (5): Place 3–5 vertically.
Hard answers
The dated guide lists these placements by region:
- Equal (4): 4–4 horizontally.
- Number (4): 1–4 horizontally.
- Number (5): 5–3 vertically.
- Number (6): 1–0 vertically and 5–2 horizontally.
- Equal (2): 5–2 horizontally, 2–2 vertically, and 2–6 vertically.
- Green Number (5): 5–3 vertically and 2–3 vertically.
- Number (0): 1–0 vertically, 3–0 horizontally, and 0–6 vertically.
- Light-blue Equal (3): 3–0 horizontally, 4–3 vertically, 2–3 vertically, 3–6 horizontally, and 3–3 horizontally.
- Number (4): 4–3 vertically.
- Light-blue Number (5): 1–3 horizontally.
The Number (24) discrepancy
Hindustan Times labels a region “Number (24)” but says its cells “must add to 5,” an apparent mismatch. The listed tiles for that entry are 3–6 horizontally, 0–6 vertically, 1–6 vertically, and 2–6 vertically. Forbes’ worked solution for this Thursday’s puzzle identifies the orange region as a total of 24 and explains that it is completed with sixes. Treat 24 as the intended total rather than relying on the conflicting “add to 5” wording.
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Forbes’ walkthrough reasons that a large equal-value region is likely filled with 3s, while the total-24 region is completed with sixes; it then uses 2s in another equal-value region. This is one contributor’s walkthrough, not a separately verified test.
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