Having trouble with today’s New York Times Pips puzzles? You’ve come to the right spot. It’s a lovely Thursday in October and I have a helpful walkthrough for today’s Hard Pips puzzle below, as well as the solutions for the Easy and Medium tiers. We’re past the halfway point in October. Halloween is just around the corner, then Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. If you’re Stranger Things fans, the show’s fifth season is spread out across November and both the major December holidays, so that’s something to look forward to. In any case, let’s solve today’s Pips!
Looking for Wednesday’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, Answers And Walkthrough
Below are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tier Pips. After that, I’ll walk you through the Hard puzzle. Spoilers ahead.
Easy
Medium
Hard
Here’s today’s Hard Pips:
I normally assign the Hard Pips a shape — a dog, a spaceship, or yesterday’s very obvious word PIPS, which was clever — but today? I have no clue. This is a blob. I’m not going to call it anything.
Step 1
I like to look for doubles in each Pips slate of dominoes. Doubles are often (but not always) necessary to finish off a group that can’t be reached from other directions. For instance, the lower Pink = group requires a double since the only way you can fill the two tiles on the right is with two of the same tiles. We’ll also need a double in the Purple 5 group, and it’s reasonable to assume that will be the 0/0 domino. But we won’t start there. We’ll start with the 4/4 domino in Pink = and the 4/3 domino from Pink = over into Green <4 like so:
Step 2
We have two more = groups and based on the dominoes we have left, they’re like 6’s and 6’s. I’m going with 6’s in Blue and 5’s in Pink because we have a double 5 and it’s more likely that we’ll need that at an edge.
I placed the 1/5 domino from Dark Blue 2 into the free tile and the 1/6 domino from Dark Blue 2 into Blue =. Then I slotted the 6/2 domino from Blue = into Orange <4.
Solution
Next up, the 5/5 domino goes into Pink = and the 5/6 domino slots from Pink = down into Blue =. Now we just have the big Purple 5 group. The 2/0 domino goes on the bottom right followed by the 0/0 domino exactly where I expected it to go. Finally, the 3/5 domino goes from Purple 5 into the last free tile. Voila! Presto! We’re done!
This was a moderately challenging Pips. I screwed up at first trying to start with Purple 5 and Dark Blue 2 but backtracked and started with the bottom left corner instead. This helped clarify things, and tackling both this corner and the right corner made the rest pretty straightforward. How’d you do?
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