Welcome to your guide to Pips, the latest game in the New York Times catalogue.

Released in August 2025, the Pips puts a unique spin on dominoes, creating a fun single-player experience that could become your next daily gaming habit.

Currently, if you’re stuck, the game only offers to reveal the entire puzzle, forcing you to move onto the next difficulty level and start over. However, we have you covered! Below are piecemeal answers that will serve as hints so that you can find your way through each difficulty level.

How to play Pips

If you’ve ever played dominoes, you’ll have a passing familiarity for how Pips is played. As we’ve shared in our previous hints stories for Pips, the tiles, like dominoes, are placed vertically or horizontally and connect with each other. The main difference between a traditional game of dominoes and Pips is the color-coded conditions you have to address. The touching tiles don’t necessarily have to match.

The conditions you have to meet are specific to the color-coded spaces. For example, if it provides a single number, every side of a tile in that space must add up to the number provided. It is possible – and common – for only half a tile to be within a color-coded space.

Here are common examples you’ll run into across the difficulty levels:

• Number: All the pips in this space must add up to the number.

• Equal: Every domino half in this space must be the same number of pips.

• Not Equal: Every domino half in this space must have a completely different number of pips.

• Less than: Every domino half in this space must add up to less than the number.

• Greater than: Every domino half in this space must add up to more than the number.

If an area does not have any color coding, it means there are no conditions on the portions of dominoes within those spaces.

Easy difficulty hints, answers for March 28 Pips

Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 0-3, placed vertically.

Equal (2): Everything in this space must be equal to 2. The answer is 2-2, placed vertically; 2-5, placed vertically; 6-2, placed vertically.

Equal (6): Everything in this space must be equal to 6. The answer is 6-2, placed vertically; 6-3, placed horizontally.

Number (3): Everything in this space must add up to 3. The answer is 6-3, placed horizontally.

Medium difficulty hints, answers for March 28 Pips

Greater Than (4): Everything in this space must be greater than 4. The answer is 2-6, placed horizontally.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 2-6, placed horizontally; 2-4, placed vertically.

Less Than (4): Everything in this space must be greater than 4. The answer is 4-1, placed horizontally.

Equal (4): Everything in this space must be equal to 4. The answer is 2-4, placed vertically; 4-1, placed horizontally; 4-0, placed vertically.

Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 4-0, placed vertically.

Number (9): Everything in this space must add up to 9. The answer is 5-4, placed horizontally.

Number (9): Everything in this space must add up to 9. The answer is 2-3, placed horizontally; 6-3, placed vertically.

Less Than (4): Everything in this space must be greater than 4. The answer is 2-3, placed horizontally.

Equal (3): Everything in this purple space must be equal to 3. The answer is 6-3, placed vertically; 3-0, placed vertically.

Number (1): Everything in this space must add up to 1. The answer is 3-0, placed vertically; 1-6, placed horizontally.

Greater Than (4): Everything in this space must be greater than 4. The answer is 1-6, placed horizontally.

Hard difficulty hints, answers for Feb. 28 Pips

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 4-3, placed horizontally.

Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 2-1, placed horizontally.

Number (1): Everything in this space must add up to 1. The answer is 2-1, placed horizontally.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 4-4, placed horizontally.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 4-4, placed horizontally.

Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 2-4, placed vertically.

Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 2-0, placed horizontally.

Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 2-0, placed horizontally.

Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 2-3, placed horizontally.

Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 0-0, placed vertically.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 2-4, placed vertically.

Number (1): Everything in this space must add up to 1. The answer is 1-3, placed vertically.

Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 0-4, placed vertically.

Number (1): Everything in this space must add up to 1. The answer is 1-0, placed horizontally.

Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 1-0, placed horizontally.

Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 0-0, placed vertically.

Number (1): Everything in this space must add up to 1. The answer is 1-4, placed vertically.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 0-4, placed vertically.

Number (1): Everything in this space must add up to 1. The answer is 1-1, placed vertically.

Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 0-3, placed horizontally.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 1-4, placed vertically.

Number (1): Everything in this space must add up to 1. The answer is 1-1, placed vertically.

Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 2-2, placed horizontally.

Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 2-2, placed horizontally.

If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

In a joint effort between Minnesota lawmakers, local law enforcement, and the Department of Commerce, legislation has been introduced to ban crypto ATMs across the state in response to widespread fraud and financial abuse, particularly of the elderly. 

Bill HF3642, sponsored by Rep. Erin Koegel, would prohibit the use of virtual currency kiosks or “crypto ATMs,” that also accept cash and debit cards, in response to 70 official complaints of financial fraud totalling over $540,000 in 2025.

The catalyst for the legislation was a single incident in which police officers responded to a call about a senior citizen who appeared confused at a gas station cryptocurrency kiosk. Upon further investigation, police discovered that she had been giving 50 percent of her monthly income to scammers, leaving her on the verge of having to live out of her car.  

According to law enforcement, the scammers often target the elderly, using false identities and emotional stories to gain power over them and coerce them into parting with their pensions or retirement savings. 

For scammers, the appeal of cryptocurrency is obvious, since converting digital currency into cryptocurrency makes it all but impossible for law enforcement to trace the money and make an arrest. But cryptocurrency platforms are opposing the ban, arguing that they’re being unfairly punished.

Larry Lipka, in-house counsel at digital currency platform CoinFlip, acknowledges the problem but opposes the proposed legislation.

“The scammers are vigilant. They’re terrible, and they’re stealing from Americans,” he told Gizmodo before arguing that their existing safety protocols, which include transaction limits and a holding period, were sufficient protection. “I know that these tools work because we’ve got 8,000 customers in the state, we have 12,000 transactions that happened in the last year and less than 1% of those were refundable by customers.”

The Commerce Department, however, disagrees. Sam Smith, government relations director at the Department of Commerce, points to the fact that just 48% of consumer complaints resulted in a refund, while those refunds averaged just 16% of the total fraud amount, as evidence that additional legislation is necessary.

As of now, approximately 350 licensed cryptocurrency kiosks operate in Minnesota, but digital currency companies across the United States could be affected by the legal precedent this bill sets. 

Full Circle, the gaming studio behind the new iteration of Skate, has recently announced a restructuring involving layoffs at its headquarters in Burnaby, British Columbia. Founded in 2021 as a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, Full Circle is just the latest in a series of AAA gaming studios to be hit by layoffs, with Ubisoft Toronto laying off 40 employees last week. 

In their public-facing announcement, entitled “skate.’s Next Chapter,” the company lamented that the people affected by layoffs “are talented colleagues and friends who helped build the foundation of skate,” while shouting out the “tens of millions” of people who have explored the Early Access version of skate. released last September. “To our departing teammates: thank you. skate. exists because of your hard work and dedication to the craft.”

The original Skate games were released in the late 2000s for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and marketed as more realistic skateboarding games compared to the rival Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series. Fans responded well to the tight controls, inventive city settings, and fun soundtrack, which won the first Skate game the “Sports Game of the Year” award at the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, and resulted in commercial success, but the series had been on indefinite hold until the announcement of skate. (known among fans as Skate 4), which was to be a live-service game built around a sandbox-style multiplayer experience, a move that didn’t sit well with many long-time fans of the series.

While the latest Skate game has not yet had a final release, the Early Access version has been available to fans for almost half a year now, and early reviews are mixed. Critics have pointed to the inclusion of microtransactions ($25 clothing for your digital character), the online-only gameplay restriction, and the homogenized character design, while others have praised the free-to-play accessibility.

We don’t yet know how many employees lost their jobs at Full Circle, as the company was not forthcoming, but the parent company, EA, lost approximately 5% of its workforce in 2024, during its last round of layoffs. As for the fate of skate. after these layoffs, much is still unknown and the game still doesn’t have a final release date.