Looking for help with today’s NYT Pips puzzles? You’ve come to the right place. Not only will you find strategies below, but full answers for each daily trio of Pips puzzles and a full walkthrough for the Hard Pips.
Grab your dominoes, Pipsqueaks, and rev up your engines. We’ve got some Pips puzzles to solve and daylight’ll soon be fading. Onward!
Looking for Tuesday’s Pips? Read our guide right here.
How To Play Pips
In Pips, you have a grid of multi=-colored 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:
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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:
Today’s Hard Pips is the word “dollar” as in “dollar dollar bills y’all” and it’s mostly very small little grids with no clear path forward. Without a great beginning strategy, I resorted to some trial and error.
Step 1
Begin with the “o” and place the 5/0 from Green 5 into Dark Blue = and the 0/0 domino below that in Dark Blue =. Hop over to the first “L” and place the 1/6 domino from Pink > 0 into Blue 16.
Step 2
Now we’ll move to the “a” and place the 5/3 domino from Orange > 3 into Dark Blue = and the 4/4 domino in the left two tiles of Blue =. The 4/3 domino goes from Blue = into Dark Blue = and the 3/3 domino fills in the remaining Dark Blue = tiles. We’ve gotten rid of four of our five doubles at this point and have three letters totally empty and three nearly filled.
Step 3
Move up to the “d” and place the 3/0 from Purple 3 down into Pink = and the 6/0 from Orange > 3 into Pink =. Place the 1/0 from Purple < 3 inot Pink = and then take a mighty leap over to the “r” and pop that 6/6 domino in the top tiles of Purple 14.
Solution
Place the 1/4 domino in the “a” from Blue < 3 into Orange > 3 and the 0/2 domino in the “r” from the free tile into Purple 14. The 2/1 domino goes in the second “L” from Green > 0 down into Pink 12 and the 5/6 domino goes below that in the remaining Pink 12 tiles. And that’s a wrap!
Have a wondrous Wednesday, Pipsqueaks!
How’d you do on today’s Pips?
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