Around here, it’s the first weekend of summer break. It’s also Memorial Day weekend, so lots of barbecues and get-togethers are happening as kids break free of school’s shackles and families and friends congregate. In the midst of all this celebratory fervor, we have an Easy, Medium and Hard Pips to solve. Grab your dominoes, folks, and let’s get to it.
Looking for Friday’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:
Today’s Hard Pips is pretty tricky, and I found myself trying too hard to make each group of tiles work on its own, without bridging from one to the next. They’re just structured in a way that kind of pushes you to solve them independently, especially because that’s mostly true. We do know that three of our blank dominos will be required for Orange < 1 and most, if not all, of the 1’s will be needed for Green < 4. Of course, it’s possible that some combination of a blank and 1’s/2’s could make up Green < 4, but we also know that we have a 6-tile Blue ≠ group. That means we only need 6 of our 7 possible Pips to fill it up, and just based on the dominos we have, it seems more likely that the 1’s will all be used in Green < 4 and the leftover blank will go in Blue ≠. With that in mind . . . let’s begin!
Step 1
Place the 0/0 domino in the bottom two Orange < 1 tiles and the 0/5 domino from Orange < 1 up into Pink 5. The 6/3 domino goes from Purple 12 down into Pink 3 and we’ll place the 6/5 domino from Purple 12 into Blue = because the most important thing right now is A) getting rid of doubles and B) getting rid of high pips so that we can meet all these < conditions.
Step 2
Next, place the 4/4 domino in the bottom two tiles of Dark Blue < 13 and the 4/3 domino from Dark Blue < 13 over into Purple < 13. The 1/1 domino goes above that in the left two tiles of Green < 4 and the 3/3 domino goes in the next two tiles of Purple < 13.
Step 3
Next, place the 1/3 domino from Green < 4 over into Purple < 13 and the 5/2 domino from Orange 5 into Dark Blue < 7. The 2/2 domino fills in the remaining Dark Blue < 7 tiles and the 5/5 domino goes directly adjacent in Blue =.
Solution
This leaves us with three dominos, all of which can go in any order in the Blue ≠ group. Voila! Presto! We’re done . . . .
Have a great Memorial Day weekend, Pipsqueaks!
How’d you do on today’s Pips?
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