Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Friday, September 19th

It’s Friday at long last and we can all rest easy knowing the weekend is almost upon us. Before we can truly celebrate, however, we have some dominoes to lay down. Let’s solve today’s Pips!

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 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 funky-looking Pips, oh my Pipsqueaks. I’m not sure what to call it. No obvious animal or vehicle or letter. Maybe it’s a hat!

Step 1

The trick with each Pips puzzle is to identify the tiles that have conditions that can only be met in the most specific possible way. Here, we have a couple things worth noting.

• First, we have no blank dominoes. This means that the central Green 4 group has to be filled in with all 1’s. That’s a helpful bit of data.
• Second, we only have two 5’s and we need one of them for the Pink 5 tile. This means that the Orange 10 group must be completed using a 6 and a 4.
• Third, we have a Blue = group that requires five of the same number, and that can only be 3 based on what we have to work with.

With these things in mind, I started at the base of the hat.

I placed the 5/4 domino from Pink 5 into Purple 7, then finished Purple 7 using the 3/1 domino. The first quarter of Green 4 is now complete.

Step 2

Knowing I needed a 6 and a 4 to complete the Orange 10, I placed the 6/1 domino from Orange 10 into Green 4 and the 4/3 domino from Orange 10 into Blue = (since we know Blue = has to be 3’s). I finished up the Green 4 group with a 1/1 domino.

Step 3

I wasn’t 100% sure how to finish the Pink 17 group, but I didn’t really need to be at this point. I knew I needed bigger numbers, so I placed the 1/4 domino into the Purple <3 tile down into Pink 17 and the 5/3 domino from Pink 17 into Blue = leaving just three dominoes for my final step.

Solution

I slotted the 2/3 domino from Dark Blue <3 into Blue = and finished that group up with the 3/3 domino. Finally, the 4/4 domino fit nicely in Pink 17 and that was that!

How did you do on today’s Pips? Let me know!

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