Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Tuesday, September 23rd

Happy autumn, Pipsqueaks! Summer has been vanquished. Fall is here. The days are getting shorter and it’s cooling down dramatically, though that’s been helped by a lot of much-needed rain up here in the desert mountains. I’m not complaining! We have some Pips puzzles to solve, so let’s get right to it!

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

Let’s do a complete walkthrough of today’s Difficult Pips. It starts out like this:

This is actually a surprisingly simple “Hard” Pips today. The trick is all these 2 groups, which means saving as many 1 and blank dominoes as possible and spending the larger numbers right away. The only number that works for the central Dark Blue = is 3 and every 3 domino we have has to go there. We can do this in just two steps.

Step 1

I began over at the Orange >2 tile and placed the 4/0 domino there into the Blue 2 group. Then I placed the 2/3 from Blue 2 into Dark Blue =. Next, I placed the 0/1 domino from the Purple <2 tile into the Green 2 group and the 1/3 domino from Green 2 into Dark Blue =, like so:

Solution

Half our dominoes are placed now. From here, I slotted the 3/0 domino from Dark Blue = into Pink 2. Then I finished up the Dark Blue = with the 3/3 domino.

The 2/1 domino goes in Pink 2 up into Purple 2 and the final 1/6 domino goes from Purple 2 up into the only free tile on the board. And that’s all, folks!

Given how tricky some of these Hard Pips can be, I was surprised to get one that felt more like a Medium-tier puzzle today. I guess the NYT puzzle setters were just going easy on us. A little autumnal reprieve, perhaps.

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