Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Wednesday, October 1st

The month of September is over and with October in its infancy, it’s time to get into an autumnal mindset. If you’re not wearing sweaters and drinking pumpkin spice lattes, get with the times! (To be fair, I rarely wear sweaters and almost never drink pumpkin lattes, but I do love the fall!) The days are getting cooler and shorter, but the puzzles are staying mostly the same. Let’s solve today’s Pips!

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:

Since the medium-tier Pips puzzle looks like a key today, I assume this is a lock. But it doesn’t really look like a lock to me, it looks like a little robot face. This robot face has lots of = groups, and it’s not immediately clear where to start or which of our numbers should go in each one. The only real clue we have is that the Purple 10 group has to have two 5’s and the Blue >10 group needs 6’s. Since we don’t have a 1/5 domino, this means Pink = needs to be blank tiles and the Orange = group needs to be 1 tiles.

Step 1

We’ll start by placing the 0/6 tile from Pink = into Blue >10 and the 0/5 domino from Pink = into Purple 10. Then we’ll place the 0/0 domino between those in Pink = and finish up the Blue >10 group by placing the 6/01 domino from there into Orange =, like so:

Step 2

We’ll keep expanding on that, adding the 5/2 domino from Purple 10 into the free tile and the 0/1 domino from Pink = down into Orange =. The next = group is Purple, and it looks like only 2’s will work, so we’ll place the 1/2 domino from Orange = into Purple = and finish up Orange = with the 1/1 domino, like so:

Solution

We can finish up the Purple = group by first laying down the 2/2 domino and then the 2/0 domino into Green 0. The 0/3 domino slots into Green 0 up into Dark Blue =. We have two dominoes left. We’ll place the 3/1 domino from Dark Blue = into the free tile, and the 0/4 domino from Pink = into the final free tile. And that’s a wrap!

All told, not a terribly difficult Pips, but I did waver a bit on how to begin, at first trying out the 1’s in Pink = until it became clear that there was no way to make that work with the Purple 10 group. Once I had that squared away, so to speak, it was pretty smooth sailing. How did you do?

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