Finally, Friday has arrived. I’ve been posting these Pips guides for about a week now, and while the puzzle doesn’t seem to be taking off quite like Wordle or Connections, it’s still making a splash in the puzzle-player world. I’m certainly enjoying the fun change of pace from word games. Besides, I’ve always loved to play with dominoes.
I suppose you could actually play this game in real life if you wanted. One person could make the grid on paper and the other person could use actual dominoes to try to fill it in. That could be a fun party game potentially. For now, we have it on the NYT Games app. Let’s solve today’s!
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 can 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 “more than.” 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 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.
Today’s Pips Solution
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
Okay, let’s dive into the Difficult tier for today’s Pips.
This was an interesting puzzle because it’s just one tall vertical bar. That makes it a unique challenge, especially since it’s ten tiles high and two tiles wide, meaning you could place all the dominoes horizontally or vertically, at least in theory.
There are mostly “total” groups here and just two = groups. No less than or greater than or does not equal groups. I looked at the top and saw the Purple 9 group and decided there were too many ways to potentially fill that in, so I went to the bottom instead. Here we have a Purple 3 tile, a Green 10 group and a Pink 18 Group. That’s easier to work with.
To total 10 we could use 4/6 or 5/5. Given we have a Pink 18 Group and an Orange 12 Group, however, I assume we need all of our 6 pip dominoes for those. I plopped the 3/5 domino into the Purple and Green tiles at the bottom, then filled the Pink Group with a 6/6 domino and the 6/5 domino up into green. This took care of the bottom third of the board, like so:
The second stage was a bit more complicated. The Dark Blue group needed to equal just 2 pips and with four tiles, that was pretty limiting. Directly above, we had the Blue = group and the Orange 12 group. I had to fiddle around here for a bit, trying out different dominoes, until I came up with a potential solution.
I placed the 1/1 domino at the bottom of Dark Blue, then filled the Dark Blue and Light Blue tiles with 0/2 on the left and the Dark Blue and Orange tiles with 0/6 on the right. Then I put the 2/6 domino in Light Blue and Orange, like so:
At this point, the remaining dominoes were pretty simple to fill. The 4/3 domino went on top, then the 5/1 domino went down from Purple to Pink and the 2/1 domino went down from open to pink, fulfilling the remaining conditions and completing the puzzle:
This was a bit trickier than some of this week’s Pips puzzles, but not the most challenging so far. All told, a very enjoyable challenge. How did you do?
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