Entertainment
NYT Pips hints, answers for May 28, 2026
Welcome to your guide to Pips, the latest game in the New York Times catalogue.
Released in August 2025, 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 on to 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 with 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:
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Number: All the pips in this space must add up to the number.
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Equal: Every domino half in this space must be the same number of pips.
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Not Equal: Every domino half in this space must have a completely different number of pips.
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Less than: Every domino half in this space must add up to less than the number.
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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 May 28 Pips
Greater Than (4): Everything in this space must be greater than 4. The answer is 3-3, placed horizontally.
Greater Than (3): Everything in this space must be greater than 3. The answer is 4-0, placed horizontally.
Greater Than (2): Everything in this space must be greater than 2. The answer is 3-1, placed vertically.
Equal (1): Everything in this space must be equal to 1. The answer is 3-1, placed vertically; 2-1, placed vertically.
Equal (2): Everything in this space must be equal to 2. The answer is 2-2, placed horizontally.
Greater Than (6): Everything in this space must be greater than 6. The answer is 4-4, placed horizontally.
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Medium difficulty hints, answers for May 28 Pips
Not Equal: Everything in this space must be different. The answer is 4-3, placed vertically; 5-5, placed vertically.
Number (5): Everything in this space must add up to 5. The answer is 5-5, placed vertically.
Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 4-4, placed horizontally.
Equal (2): Everything in this space must be equal to 2. The answer is 5-2, placed horizontally; 2-2, placed horizontally.
Not Equal: Everything in this red space must be different. The answer is 5-6, placed vertically; 4-4, placed horizontally; 3-3, placed horizontally; 2-2, placed horizontally.
Hard difficulty hints, answers for May 28 Pips
Number (6): Everything in this space must add up to 6. The answer is 3-6, placed horizontally.
Equal (3): Everything in this space must be equal to 3. The answer is 3-6, placed horizontally; 3-3, placed vertically; 3-2, placed horizontally.
Greater Than (1): Everything in this space must be greater than 1. The answer is 3-2, placed horizontally.
Number (6): Everything in this space must add up to 6. The answer is 6-5, placed vertically.
Number (6): Everything in this space must add up to 6. The answer is 6-5, placed vertically; 1-0, placed vertically.
Equal (0): Everything in this space must be equal to 0. The answer is 1-0, placed vertically; 0-0, placed horizontally.
Not Equal: Everything in this space must be different. The answer is 1-4, placed vertically; 3-0, placed vertically; 2-6, placed vertically.
Less Than (3): Everything in this space must be less than 3. The answer is 0-6, placed vertically.
Greater Than (3): Everything in this space must be greater than 3. The answer is 4-6, placed vertically.
Equal (6): Everything in this space must be equal to 6. The answer is 0-6, placed vertically; 4-6, placed vertically; 6-6, placed vertically; 6-1, placed vertically.
Equal (1): Everything in this space must be equal to 1. The answer is 1-3, placed vertically; 6-1, placed vertically; 1-1, placed vertically.
Number (3): Everything in this space must add up to 3. The answer is 1-3, placed vertically
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Entertainment
One dashboard, 20+ AI models — get ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more for $79
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Credit: ChatPlayground AI
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Entertainment
The best Dyson vacuums actually make vacuuming fun: See my favorites for 2026
Read my full review of the Dyson PencilVac.
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones takes the small space vacuum to a whole new level. It’s unbelievably slim and lightweight, and seamlessly scoots into tight crevices near furniture that don’t get dusted often enough. If there are certain spots in your home that you avoid cleaning just because it’s too tight of a squeeze, the PencilVac is about to change your life.
“Fluffy” references the ultra-soft material cushioning the four brush rolls, which provide a gloriously glide on hardwood you don’t want to scratch. The PencilVac’s short battery life and limited suction power wouldn’t be ideal in homes with more than just a few rooms or lots of carpeting.
No stick vacuum takes “stick” as literally as the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones. It doesn’t have a main body with a battery pack, handle, or dustbin like any other traditional cordless vacuum. It’s just a wand and a funky cleaning head with four microfiber cones as brush rolls — the coolest little vacuum that’s truly grab and go.
The whole vacuum can fit just about anywhere, and tight squeezes are even more accessible with a cleaning head that can spin a full 360 degrees. The agile design led me to so many awkward dusty spots that other cordless vacuums can’t comfortably reach: the small chunks of floor between furniture and the wall, between island and bar stool legs, beside the toilet, or under the low-hanging credenza. The PencilVac had commendable hard floor performance in my apartment, offering near-perfect pickup of daily debris like cat hair and long human hair, kitchen crumbs, multiple types of cat litter, and dust.
Oh yeah, the Fluffycones cleaning head has two dust-detecting lasers. One laser projects out the front to point out the hair and tiny flecks lying ahead, and one laser projects out the back to illuminate anything that you just missed. It’s so satisfying that you’ll accidentally end up cleaning for much longer than you meant to, only to be cut off by the pitiful battery life.
With the precision nozzle wand attached, the PencilVac weighs in at just 2.9 pounds. This uniquely compact design makes cleaning cobwebs out of ceiling corners or dusting baseboards so much less of a pain. The wand’s diameter is just 1.5 inches the entire way down, which made it possible to vacuum behind my dresser without pulling it out a foot from the wall.
Entertainment
RAMageddon is making it harder to find the best Windows laptops. These 10 are actually worth it.
I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.
Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it’s super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren’t nearly as compact.
This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it’s very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)
For what it’s worth, I also tried a $1,700 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech. It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is fantastic for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn’t have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn’t a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.
The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It’s a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can’t draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.
