Another day, another NYT Pips puzzle to solve. If you enjoy number puzzles, but not necessarily complicated math, this is a puzzle for you. It’s simple to learn, but still gets the little grey cells buzzing. Today was challenging. I even found myself a little turned around by the Easy tier puzzle! Let’s give it a shot, shall we?
Looking for Monday’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
As always, I’ll walk you through today’s Difficult Pips. Here’s what it looks like before you get started:
Ten dominoes and a whole bunch of different groups, most of which are totals groups. There’s just one = group here and one > (greater than) group. This Green >3 group almost messed me up today, because half the time I get the symbol backwards and think it means “less than”. Oy vey.
In any case, I like to find tiles that have no other real options and today, the best one to start with was at the top upper left. There’s a Pink 0 tile next to a Purple 5 group. We only have two dominoes with blank sides, and one has 6 pips. This means we can only use the double blank tile in the top left tiles, since 6 would be too many for the Purple 5 group. There’s a Purple 0 down the left side, and obviously the only domino that can go there is our last blank-sided domino, with 6 jutting over into Blue 21. Like so:
I decided to keep filling in this side of the board first. We only had one 3 pip domino, so that went in the Green 3 tile, with 5 spilling over into Blue 21. I placed the 5/6 domino into the upper left Purple 5 group, which mean I now had a total of 17 pips in Blue 21. The 4/5 domino went into Blue 21 and over into Orange 11, like so:
With half our dominoes spent, most of the hard work was out of the way. Again, the Green >3 group screwed me up here and made me think I’d made some mistake, but once I realized I was looking at it backwards, the dominoes fell into place. 6/1 finished off the Orange 11 group, with the 1 pip going into Dark Blue 3. With four 2 pip dominoes left, the most likely Pink = had to be 2’s, so I put the 2/2 domino from Dark Blue 3 down into Pink = and then the 2/4 domino from Pink = down into Green >3 tile. With two dominoes left, it was easy enough to place the 2/6 and 1/3 dominoes into Orange 3 and Dark Blue 9 respectively. These could have gone in either spot. The final grid looks like so:
A pretty challenging set of Pips puzzles today all around! I guess we’re starting out September with a healthy challenge in this brand new NYT puzzle game. Are you enjoying it so far? Let me know!
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