Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Friday, September 12th

I’m having a bit of a hard time keeping my mind off the news. Current affairs being what they are, it’s all pretty grim and depressing. But I am going to distract myself from all this madness by playing games. Specifically, a rousing game of Pips. Let’s solve today’s.

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:

I’m not sure what this Pips is supposed to be, but I’m going with donkey. A donkey named Pipsy. This donkey has one very big clue hidden in its ear. The Purple 1 tile at the top is an easy place to start, since there is only one domino with 1 pip.

The second big clue in this puzzle are the three 0 tiles. There are exactly three dominoes with blank sides, so we know that each of these must go in one of the three 0 tiles.

We also have two large total groups: Green 30, which must use five 6 pip dominoes, and Dark Blue 20, which (given we need our 6’s for Green) must use four 5 pip dominoes.

I placed the 1/4 domino down into the Pink ≠ group to start, then slotted the 4/5 domino from Blue 4 into Pink ≠. That meant we had a 5 and a 4 in the Pink tiles, so I used the 0/3 domino from Orange 0 into Pink ≠. Just to round out the head, I plopped the 2/5 from Pink ≠ into Dark Blue 20, like so:

Originally, I’d placed the 0/5 domino into Pink 0 / Purple = over in the donkey’s tail. I realized that this left me with no option to place a domino from Dark Blue 20 into Green 30 (I needed a 5/6 to make that work), so I swapped it out with a 0/4 and placed the 4/6 domino next to it. Then I slotted the 6/6 domino next to that and the 5/5 domino in Dark Blue 20, like so:

The rest was pretty straightforward. I placed the 5/6 domino from Dark Blue 20 down into Green 30. The 6/3 domino wrapped up Green 30 and jutted over into the free tile. The final two dominoes went into the donkey’s legs, like so:

I like these animal shapes. It makes me think of animal crackers. I prefer the animal crackers that are frosted over the plain ones. Now I’m craving animal crackers, dang it.

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