Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Wednesday, August 27th

Another day, another brand new set of Pips puzzles to solve. Pips is the latest game on the New York Times Games App, and it’s proved to be quite a hit with players. I definitely enjoy the three tiers of difficulty. Warm up with Easy and Medium, then test your skills against the Difficult. It really does make you think a very specific way about how to approach each puzzle, finding the most specific conditions and working out from there. In any case, let’s solve today’s!

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 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.

Today’s Pips Solution

I’m going to just post the solution for Easy and Medium, then go into a bit more detail and depth on Difficult. Spoilers ahead.

Easy

Medium

Difficult

Okay, let’s dive into the Difficult tier for today’s Pips. This is what the puzzle looks like today:

I always look for something that can’t work anywhere else. In today’s case, the Green boxes that must equal zero were a good place to start. There were only two dominoes with Blanks on them (Blanks = zero pips). I knew they had to go in the green tiles, but I wasn’t sure how exactly.

The next place to look is an = group that has a lot of tiles. Usually, there’s only one pip that will work for this since it requires so many. The only possibility today—for the blue group of five boxes—were the dominoes with 1 pip on them, since there were five of those. So I placed the 0/1 domino where the 0 went into green and the 1 went into blue. Then I placed th 0/5 domino into green and grey.

From here, I looked for other specific conditions. The pink box (=5) fit the bill, since there was only one 5 domino remaining. I placed that with the 2 down in the dark blue group, like so:

At this point, most of the hard work was out of the way. I moved over to the purple 6 and noticed that there was a 6/4 domino and a 4/2 domino. That meant the 6/4 could go down into the Orange = group, and the 4/2 could finish the Orange and Dark Blue groups.

The other 6/6 domino had to go in the Pink = 6 tile. The 2/2 domino had to go in the Blue = 2 tile. The remaining 1/1 domino filled out the left tiles of the Blue = group, and the 1/3 domino filled out the final tile in that group . . . and that was that! A pretty easy one compared to some.

How did you do on your Pips puzzles today? Do you feel like you’re getting the hang of this game? I like how it’s pretty simple but still makes you think. I imagine we’ll get some super challenging puzzles in the future.

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