For Sunday, August 9, the latest Pips guide laid out the full Hard solution and named the answer as NEW. It also walked players through the rest of the daily trio, giving puzzle-solvers a direct path through the grid of colored boxes and dominoes.
That is the draw for anyone searching Pips today: the game asks players to use every domino and satisfy every color condition, and the guide does the heavy lifting for Easy, Medium, and Difficult before reaching the hardest board. On the Hard puzzle, the write-up says there are three doubles and only one group that obviously needs a double, which is why the solution can be pinned down step by step instead of guessed.
The walkthrough starts by treating the N as a free tile and setting it aside, then moves backward from the W. From there, the 3/1 domino from Purple < 4 goes down into Orange 7, the 2/2 domino from Orange 7 goes down into Dark Blue < 3, and the 5/1 domino runs from Pink > 4 down into Orange 7. The 2/1 domino goes from Orange 7 down into Green < 2, while the 6/1 domino goes from Blue > 5 down into Orange 7. The 6/2 domino from Pink > 5 goes into Purple 8, then the 6/4 domino from Purple 8 goes down into Orange =.
From there the pattern keeps tightening. The 4/2 domino goes from Orange = into Green 2, the 4/5 domino goes from Orange = down into Dark Blue =, and the 5/6 domino from Dark Blue = goes into Green > 5. The 1/1 domino goes in the two Pink 2 tiles, with the 4/4 domino above that in Blue =. Then the 3/6 domino goes from Orange < 4 up into Purple 15, the 6/0 domino goes from Purple 15 into Dark Blue 0, and the 4/3 domino goes from Blue 4 into the final Purple 15 tile. The 0/1 domino goes from Dark Blue 0 up into the one and only free tile, closing the board.
The only wrinkle is the one that makes the answer feel earned rather than obvious: the writer says they almost thought the Hard word was HEW at first. That near miss matters because it shows how close the board can look before the exact domino placement forces the final word into place, and it leaves one practical question hanging behind the tidy solve — why the Hard puzzle resolves to NEW rather than a near-lookalike is never explained in the guide.
For players of Pips, the point is simple. The Sunday guide hands over the answers and the route through the hardest board, and the next move is to use the same logic on today’s puzzle before the daily grid resets. After that, the only thing left is the next guide, and the same kind of step-by-step solve that can turn a stalled board into a finished one.
