NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Sunday, May 31

If you're staring at a stubbornly empty grid in today's New York Times Pips, you're not alone. The Sunday, May 31 puzzle has stumped many players, but a new walkthrough breaks down exactly how to match dominoes to tiles and clear the board. The New York Times has quietly built an empire of daily brainteasers, and Pips is its latest attempt to hook puzzle fans. Launched in early 2025, Pips challenges players to place numbered tiles that resemble dominoes into a grid so that adjacent numbers match. Unlike Wordle or Connections, which rely on vocabulary logic, Pips is pure visual pattern recognition—think Mahjong meets a logic grid. The walkthrough for May 31, published by Forbes contributor Erik Kain, offers step-by-step hints rather than outright answers. Kain, a veteran games journalist who has covered every NYT puzzle since Wordle, suggests starting with the edge tiles and working inward. The puzzle itself uses a standard 7-tile set (0 through 6), but the Sunday edition often introduces larger grids or unique starting configurations. For May 31, the grid appears to be a 6x6 layout with a few pre-placed tiles. The key, according to the guide, is to identify forced matches early—tiles that can only connect in one place—before tackling open ends. This strategy mirrors techniques used in classic domino games like Mexican Train. The popularity of NYT Pips underscores a broader trend: demand for low-stakes, daily mental workouts that take less than 10 minutes. The Times now boasts over a million daily active users across its puzzle portfolio, and Pips is growing quickly among Wordle refugees who want something fresh. What makes this walkthrough valuable isn't just the specific May 31 solution—which the guide intentionally withholds until the final step—but the reusable logic it teaches. Readers who master the 'forced match' approach can apply it to any future Pips puzzle. Looking ahead, NYT will likely introduce themed Pips puzzles or timed modes to keep engagement high. For now, Sunday's puzzle is a challenging but satisfying brain stretch.