Monday is back. The weekend went by fast! I suppose it’s all these puzzles we have to solve each day. Between Pips and Wordle, Connections and Strands, Spelling Bee and whatever else you play, it’s a good chunk of time. Nice distractions from the state of the world, I suppose. Alright, let’s arrange some dominoes!
Looking for Sunday’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.
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
Let’s do a complete walkthrough of today’s Difficult Pips. It starts out like this:
This is clearly a bungalow. It has a door and everything. Some planters out front. A cozy little house or cottage. It’s also a very unique Pips. I’ve never seen a Total group this large before. 63! You could spend a long time agonizing over how to add up the correct dominoes, but I don’t recommend it.
Here’s what I did.
Step 1
I actually placed these dominoes a bit differently the first time. I put the 1/2 domino from Pink 1 down into Purple 63 and the 1/5 domino over in Blue 1 into the free tile. I had to swap those in the end, but I figured I might. My strategy was to avoid counting, and just placed the dominoes I knew *could* work in all the tiles that weren’t the huge Purple 63 group.
I knew the 6/5 domino had to go in Orange 6 into Purple 63. This was the only 6 on the board and so it had to go there. I then placed the 4/4 in the Green 4 / Pink 4 tiles and the 0/0 domino into the Dark Blue 0 / Blue 0 tiles. I didn’t know that these would be correct, but I figured I’d put them all down like this and see what happened.
As I noted above, I had to swap the 1/5 and 1/2 dominoes, but beyond that my placement was perfect. The rest of the dominoes I just placed randomly across the Purple 63 group and that ended up doing the trick. Huzzah!
This was probably the easiest Pips I’ve played so far, but it was quite daunting at first. We’ve never had such a large group before and I was worried it would be hard to get the right number in there. Thankfully, that was not the case!
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