Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Thursday, September 4th

It’s Thor’s Day. The first week of September is flying by. The latest NYT Games puzzle is keeping many of us occupied, as we figure out how to fit dominoes on a grid of colorful tiles. It’s a fun little challenge that’s made for a nice change of pace from my usual word puzzles. Let’s solve today’s, shall we?

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:

A bit of a tricky Pips today, as it’s not entirely clear how to start. We have several Total groups, a couple = groups and just one > tile, that really could be a few different things. I decided I’d use the Purple 24 group as my anchor point. With no 6 pips dominoes, my best guess was this would need four 5 pip tiles and one 4 pip tile to complete. I decided to place the 2/5 domino in the Pink > tile, over into the Purple 24 Group.

Based on the number of 3 and 4 pips dominoes, I figured the Dark Blue = group would be 3’s and the Green = Group would be 4’s. There were extras of each, but more 4’s than 3’s. I used the extra 4 in the 0/4 domino to place in the Blue 0 tile, down into the Purple 4 group. Then I placed the 1/5 domino in Orange 4 / Purple 24 and the 3/5 domino in the Dark Blue = / Purple 24, like so:

This felt like a pretty solid foundation. One entire corner was filled in and I had a good sense of where I wanted to go from here. I stuck the 2/4 domino into Orange 4 / Green = and then the 3/4 domino into Dark Blue = / Green = and finally, rounded out the Orange 4 with the 1/0 domino into Purple 0, like so:

I had just three dominoes left, so unless I’d screwed up badly I knew I was about to wrap this one up. I placed the 0/5 domino into the open tile down into Purple 24, finishing that group. The 1/4 domino went into the open tile / Green = and wrapped that group up. Finally, the 0/3 domino went into Purple 0 and the last open tile and that, ladies and gentlemen, was that.

This one took a bit to get started as there were no super obvious ways to begin, but with a little deduction and domino counting, I got off to a good start and was able to knock this out pretty quickly. How did you do?

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