NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Solution And Walkthrough For Wednesday, November 19

It’s been raining all week long and now it looks like rain might turn to snow, which makes for the iciest driving conditions. All the wet roads freeze and then the snow hides the icy patches. It’s the kind of weather made for soup, old movies, hot cocoa, not going anywhere, and staying inside solving puzzles. What say we 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. 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:

Our first double-digit number, this Hard Pips is clearly the number 10. I think that we’ve had every number 0 – 10 at this point over the last couple weeks. No dogs, no spaceships, just numbers. (To be fair, today’s Medium Pips does look like a spaceship). Similar to how yesterday’s “9” had mostly 9 groups, this one has mostly 10’s.

Step 1

The only obvious place to start in today’s Hard Pips is in the “1” because the Purple = group requires six of the same Pips, and the only thing we have that can fulfill that condition are our blank dominoes. It’s not 100% obvious which ones go where, and I had to trial and error this (where my “1” ended up I originally had a “2”) but here’s what to do:

Place the 0/5 domino at the top of Purple = into Pink 10. The 0/2 domino goes below that into Pink 10 and the 0/1 domino goes from Purple = into the single free tile. Next, place the 0/0 domino vertically in the two Purple = tiles, leaving just one for Step 2.

Step 2

We’ll wrap up the “1” here by placing the 0/6 domino from Purple = into Blue 10 and the 4/3 domino from Blue 10 up into Pink 10, like so:

Step 3

Moving to the “0,” place the 6/6 domino in the bottom right corner from Dark Blue 10 into Green 10. The 4/1 domino goes above that from Green 10 into Orange 1. The 4/5 domino lays horizontally from Dark Blue 10 into Orange 10 and the 5/5 domino goes up from Orange 10 into Dark Blue 10.

Solution

Place the 5/3 domino from Dark Blue 10 into Blue 10 and the 2/2 domino into the next two Blue 10 tiles. Wrap things up with the 3/1 domino from Blue 10 into Orange 10 and you’re done!

This wasn’t the hardest of the number Pips, but it was reasonably challenging and I definitely got stumped for a bit over by Dark Blue 10 and Green 10, though moving the 0/2 and 0/1 on the other side freed me to swap two other dominoes that ended up completing the puzzle.

How did you do on today’s Pips? Did anyone find a different solution?

Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Be sure to follow me for all your daily puzzle-solving guides, TV show and movie reviews and more here on this blog!