Wednesday is here and we’ve come smackdab to the very center of the work week, solving puzzles left and right as we make our way toward Friday and the weekend. Pips is the latest game in the New York Times Games app and I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am. Let’s tackle today’s three Pips puzzles, shall we?
Looking for Tuesday’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 a bit of a tricky one to get a bead on where to start, but when in doubt, I just pick a side and look for conditions that might work. Sometimes you have to go with trial and error.
Today, I opted to start with the left side and work my way to the right. A few observations: There are 2 = groups of two tiles and 2 = groups of three tiles here. We have several dominoes that could fulfill these conditions. 6’s, 4’s, 3’s and 2’s. This is a tricky way to begin. Based on the shape, however, I knew that the top left and bottom left had to align specific ways (horizontal and vertical respectively) which limits other domino placements.
I put the 3/6 domino from Purple 3 into Orange = vertically and the 1/3 domino into Purple <3 and Pink = horizontally. Then I placed the 6/5 domino into Orange = over to Dark Blue <6. I did this because based on how these would align, I knew we’d need to place a double domino into Green = because the Pink >3 tile also needed to be placed up into Green =, boxing it in.
Next I placed the 6/2 domino into the Pink >3 tile up into Green = and then the 2/2 domino next to that to finish up the Green = group. The only other double domino was the 4/4 and there was no domino that had a 4 and a pip greater than 3, so green had to be 2.
Finally, I placed the 4/4 domino into Blue =, the 3/5 domino into Pink = over into the free tile, and the 4/3 domino from Blue = into the last remaining free tile, like so:
I did get this one a little wrong at first. I had placed the 3/6 first just like above, but then I put the 2/2 domino into the Purple <3 group over into Pink =. After all, there were enough 2’s to make that work. The problem was I needed that double domino for Green and the 4’s didn’t work in Pink >3. Once I realized this and swapped the 1/3 domino into that slot, everything fell into place. Like I said, trial and error. Sometimes you can’t quite see the shape of things until you try something out and it doesn’t work. You have to fail before you succeed sometimes, in Pips and in life.
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