This is my attempt at writing a Go based solver for the NYT Pips game released on 2025-08-18, and is strictly for fun! Accordingly, comments, unit tests, design plans, etc., if supplied, may not live up to professional standards.
I take no credit for the Pips game. Maybe for the first solver on GitHub (none appeared on Google when I started the project).
Update: As of 8/26/2025, I have seen a few nice ones online that are much more usable!
With the exception of some documentation & GH Actions setup, this was NOT an exercise in "Vibe Coding", "Prompt Engineering", or speed running development with enhanced auto-complete (i.e. Copilot). That tooling is exciting and useful, but I wanted to approach this like a classic open-docs coding challenge.
Perhaps down the road I may leverage more resources to explore optimizations, create a proper GUI for generating input files, or crafting fancy terminal visualizations using print statements - tasks I have far less interest in - but for now I am shooting for an unaided MVP that can reliably solve these puzzles.
- a working Go environment (>=1.25.x) - Download Here
- clone the repo
- copy a known working example JSON file from
/test_filesor create one using the README in/input - in a terminal, run
go run . -f {{your file name}}.json - test one of the found solutions in your NYT Games App or on the website
Example
I would love to hear your feedback on my solution, optimization ideas, potential bugs, and the like. Contact info should be on my profile!
Feel free to use, share, copy (credit appreciated), or whatever else.
If you want to contribute tests, an input file creation UI, or something else - email me or create a PR.