The weekend is here at last, oh my Pipsqueaks. Huzzah! I’m settling back into my routine, getting back to my daily workouts and (hopefully soon) catching up on some sleep. Sleep is important but I’m a notorious nightowl, even though I don’t really do anything late at night other than watch my shows and read. Reading helps me sleep, typically, but even when I have insomnia, I figure at least I’m feeding my mind. We can feed our minds now with today’s Pips puzzle!
Looking for Thursday’s Pips? Read our guide right here.
How To Play Pips
In Pips, you have a grid of multicolored boxes. Each colored area represents a different “condition” that you have to achieve. You have a select number of dominoes that you have to spend filling in the grid. You must use every domino and achieve every condition properly to win. There are Easy, Medium and Difficult tiers.
Here’s an example of a difficult tier Pips:
As you can see, the grid has a bunch of symbols and numbers with each color. On the far left, the three purple squares must not equal one another (hence the equal sign crossed out). The two pink squares next to that must equal a total of 0. The zig-zagging blue squares all must equal one another. You click on dominoes to rotate them, and will need to since they have to be rotated to fit where they belong.
Not shown on this grid are other conditions, such as “less than” or “greater than.” If there are multiple tiles with > or < signs, the total of those tiles must be greater or less than the listed number. It varies by grid. Blank spaces can have anything. The various possible conditions are:
- = All pips must equal one another in this group.
- All pips must not equal one another in this group.
- > The pip in this tile (or tiles) must be greater than the listed number.
- < The pip in this tile must be less than the listed number.
- An exact number (like 6) The pip must equal this exact number.
- Tiles with no conditions can be anything.
In order to win, you have to use up all your dominoes by filling in all the squares, making sure to fit each condition. Play today’s Pips puzzle here.
NYT Pips Today: Hints and Answers for Saturday, October 4
Below are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tier Pips. After that, I’ll walk you through the Difficult puzzle. Spoilers ahead.
Easy
Medium
Difficult
Let’s do a complete walkthrough of today’s Difficult Pips. It starts out like this:
To me, today’s Pips looks like a spaceship from the computer game, FTL, and to show you why I think this, here is a screenshot from that game:
Step 1
This is a deceptively simple—or deceptively tricky?—Pips. There are only eight dominoes, and the largest group is four tiles. But I still found it quite challenging, simply because it’s tough to know where to begin in a puzzle like this.
The main thing we have to focus on is the Green 4 group. Because there are three 0 tiles, it’s not likely that we’ll be able to use any 0 dominoes on Green 4, so I went in with the assumption that we would need to use all 1’s.
I had to start over once, because the temptation is to start laying down everything up top in its own rectangle, but in order to solve this grid, we have to put a couple dominoes from the top down into Green 4.
We’ll place the 3/1 domino from Orange 3 into the Green 4 block, then place the 0/1 domino from the Dark Blue 0 tile into the Green 4 block. Next, we’ll lay the 1/1 domino over the last two tiles of the Green 4 block, and the 2/1 domino in Pink 3, like so:
Solution
We’ll finish up the lower half with the 0/3 domino from the Purple 0 tile into the free tile. Next, the 4/4 domino goes in the Purple = group in the top left. Finally, place the 0/0 domino from the Pink 0 tile into Blue <3 and the 1/4 domino from Blue <3 into the final free tile. And that’s a wrap! This is a tricky Pips, but I think it’s also my first 2-step solution.
If you play PC games, definitely give FTL a shot. It’s super cheap on Steam ($2.49 as of this writing) and very challenging but fun. It’s very much a roguelike puzzle game, where the puzzles involve enemy spaceships attacking, resource management and hard choices. You could probably combine it with Pips and have a space-sim where you have to solve the puzzle under a certain time or your ship is destroyed. But I’m always thinking of how to come up with new games. Have a great weekend, Pipsqueaks!
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