Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Friday, September 5th

We have a pretty tricky Pips puzzle on our hands today. Even the Medium tier gave me a bit of difficulty as I started it out wrong and had to clear the board and try again. The Difficult tier is daunting in shape and size. Let’s dive right in!

Looking for Wednesday’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:

As daunting as this Pips looks, it actually gives us a very solid path and a clear starting point. Since the bottom Dark Blue 18 group can only be solved with three 6’s, we’ll start there. I placed the double 6 domino first, then the 6/0 domino inot the Orange 0 group, since those five Orange tiles all have to be blanks. I plopped the double blank domino in next, since it’s the only one that fits, like so:

Next up, we have a Blue = group of five tiles and a Pink = group of three tiles. Now it’s mostly a matter of checking how many dominoes you have with how many pips on each side. We have a lot of 5’s and 3’s. We have a lot of a lot of things, but only 5’s were enough to fulfill the Blue = group condition.

We also have a limited number of blank pip dominoes, which led me to believe the Pink = group must have 4’s. So I placed the 0/5 domino into Orange and Blue, and the 0/4 domino into Orange and Pink. Then I used the 5/5 domino to continue filling in the Blue group, and the 4/5 in Pink/Blue right above.

We only have one more Pink tile and one more Blue tile at this point, and both are adjacent to a Purple 2 group. So I placed the 4/1 domino into Pink/Purple and the 5/1 group into Blue/Purple, like so:

At this point, half the board and change is done, and I’m pretty sure that everything is kosher so far. I can’t think of any other way these tiles could be filled.

It’s still not super clear what goes where, but there’s one big clue: The Green 6 tile has to have a 6 pip domino and the Blue 2 has to have two 1 pip dominoes since there aren’t any blanks remaining. So I placed the 6/2 domino into Green/Dark Blue and the 2/1 domino into Dark Blue/Blue. With those filled in, the only way to finish up the Orange = group was our final double domino (3/3). The final 1 pip had to go in Blue so I placed it there, with the 3 spilling over into Purple ≠.

Finally, the 5/2 domino went into Purple ≠ / Pink = and the 2/3 went right next to that, like so:

Today’s Pips had the most varying conditions of any we’ve seen in a long time. Ironically, in some ways this makes it easier even though it looks like it would be more challenging. Very specific conditions take away some of the vagueness of less complicated puzzles. Identifying those is crucial to a smooth solution. How did you do today?

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