The weekend has passed, and the NYT puzzle game remains as popular as ever. Monday brings another bookkeeping session, and it’s time to settle scores again. Interestingly, today’s match was somewhat unexpected. Recent games have been quite tricky, but this one was easier. So, let’s get started.
Looking for Sunday’s Pips?
How to Play Pips
Pips consists of a grid populated with multicolored boxes. Each color represents a specific “condition” that you need to meet. Your goal is to fill the grid with a designated number of dominoes while ensuring you use all of them and meet the required conditions. The game offers Easy, Medium, and Hard levels.
Here’s a quick glimpse of a more challenging Pips grid.
In this grid, you’ll see an arrangement of symbols and numbers in various colors. For example, the three purple squares on the left have to be different, as indicated by the strikethrough equal signs. Meanwhile, the two pink squares adjacent to them need to total zero, and all blue squares in a zigzag formation must match each other. You can click on the dominoes to rotate them into the desired orientation.
Note that conditions such as “less than” or “greater than” aren’t represented here. There are a few straightforward rules to follow:
- All pips in this group must be equal to each other.
- All pips in this group must not be equal to each other.
- The pips of this tile must be greater than the number indicated.
- An exact number pip must equal this specified number.
- Any tile without conditions can be utilized.
Winning involves filling in every square and using all the dominoes while satisfying each condition.
Today’s NYT Pips: Tips, Answers, Walkthrough
Here are the solutions for the Easy and Medium levels of Pips, followed by a look at the more challenging puzzles. Spoilers are ahead.
Easy
Today’s Pips for the Easy level.
Medium
And here for the Medium level.
Difficult
Today’s tough Pips involve:
Honestly, I’m not exactly bursting with creativity when tackling these hard Pips. At first glance, it almost resembles a spaceship—maybe a mini version of a famous Star Wars craft.
Step 1
The greatest challenge here is figuring out your starting point. There aren’t too many dominoes or tiles that need to be filled, and the conditions aren’t overly complex. Each group is limited to three tiles. After some counting, I concluded that the blue group (the largest on the board) should equal one. The number six, which I had enough of (three), would also be needed elsewhere.
I started with a 6/5 domino with purple >1 on pink 10, followed by a 5/0 domino with pink 10 on orange =. This domino fits neatly into the orange space and shifts to the free tile.
Step 2
I then placed a 1/6 domino of blue = on dark blue >4, and a 1/4 domino of blue = on green =.
Solution
Finally, I positioned a 4/3 domino on the second free tile from green, and a 1/2 domino was placed on the last free blue tile. This is how it turned out:
Honestly, I found this quite straightforward. This really only felt like a mid-tier Pips challenge. I didn’t have to rethink my strategy at all. A few seconds of thought was enough before I got going on what blue needed, and I laid everything out without needing to make adjustments. So, New York Times, what’s in store for us next? After some stimulating puzzles, will Monday feel like a breeze? I guess we’ll see.
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