NYT Pips Hints, Walkthrough And Solutions For Tuesday, November 4

Are your dominoes not lining up properly? Are the colorful tiles in the newest NYT Game, Pips, too dazzling? Or maybe you just want to compare notes. Whatever the case, I have the solutions for the Easy and Medium Pips puzzles below and a full walkthrough of the Hard Pips. It’s another beautiful November day, but it’s definitely cooling down. The leaves are falling. Time to heat up that apple cider and solve today’s Pips!

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. Sometimes there’s only one way to solve the puzzle. Other times, there can be two or more different solutions. Play today’s Pips puzzle here.

Today’s Pips Solutions And Walkthrough

Below are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tier Pips. After that, I’ll walk you through the Hard puzzle. Spoilers ahead.

Today’s Easy Pips

Today’s Medium Pips

Hard Pips Walkthrough And Solution

Here’s today’s Hard Pips:

Every new Hard Pips is a new Rorschach test, as far as I’m concerned, and I see a dinosaur in this one. Just a baby dinosaur. What a cutie.

We have three free tiles to work with here, plus two big = groups. We also know that every blank tile we have will need to be used in the Pink 0 group. That’s a pretty good place to start.

Step 1

Begin with the 4/0 domino from the free tile up into Pink 0. The 2/0 domino will go in the Purple < 3 tile over into Pink 0 and the double blank domino will fill the remaining Pink 0 tiles.

Step 2

At first, I tried 6’s in the Blue = group but this didn’t work. So I cleared those and tried 5’s, the only other Pips we have enough of for a group of five tiles. Place the 4/5 domino in the free tile over into Blue =. Next, the 5/5 domino will slot vertically to the right of that. The 5/1 domino lays down from Blue = into Orange 2 and the 5/3 domino goes up from Blue = into Purple 3.

Next, place the 3/1 domino from Purple 3 into the second Orange 2 group and the 3/4 domino from Purple 3 into Pink 8.

Solution

We’re on the home stretch now! The 1/4 domino slots from the top Orange 2 into Pink 8. Place the 2/6 domino from the Dark Blue 2 tile into Green = and place the 6/6 domino horizontally directly below that.

The 1/6 domino fills in the final Orange 2 tile down into Green = and we’ll wrap this one up with the 6/4 domino from Green = into the final free tile slot. Notice, all free tiles are filled with 4’s.

This wasn’t too challenging, actually, with some obvious clues on where to begin thanks to the limited number of blank dominoes. The only confusing bit was figuring out whether or 5’s or 6’s went in each of the Blue and Green = groups, but the limitations on what would work up in Purple = helped.

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