Today’s Pips Puzzle: Insights and Solutions

If you’re looking for help with today’s NYT Pips puzzle, you’ve landed in the right spot. Today’s Hard Pips is particularly intriguing as it appears to have multiple solutions. Typically, Pips presents a single answer, but a reader recently highlighted a different solution from mine. So, it seems, it might just depend on various factors.

Interestingly, I found the medium pips to be quite challenging today—almost as tricky as the hard ones. It goes to show that some days can be like that. Let’s dive in and see how it unfolds.

How to Play Pips

Pips consists of a grid filled with multicolored boxes, each representing a different condition that players need to meet. Your goal is to fill this grid using a certain number of dominoes. To win, you need to use all the dominoes and satisfy each condition accurately. There are varying levels of difficulty: Easy, Medium, and Hard.

Take a look at this example of a difficult layer in Pips.

In the grid, you see symbols and numbers of different colors. For instance, the three purple squares on the left must not be the same, hence the strikethrough equals signs. The two pink squares nearby need to sum up to zero. All the blue squares in the zigzag pattern must match. You’ll have to rotate dominoes since they’ll need to fit into specific positions.

Other conditions like “less than” or “greater than” might not be explicitly shown in this grid. Here are some essential rules:

• 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 (or tiles) must be greater than the number listed.
• An exact numbered pip must match that number.
• Any tile without conditions can be used freely.

The objective is to fill every square while using up all the dominoes while ensuring you meet all the conditions presented.

Today’s Pips Solution and Walkthrough

Here are the solutions for the Easy and Medium levels of Pips. After that, we’ll discuss the hard puzzles, and yes, spoilers are ahead.

Easy Pips Today

Today’s easy pips puzzle is structured simply, but it still poses challenges. It’s like a letter “J” for Easy, while the Medium one resembles a “T.” Moving to the harder puzzles, I found it more abstract. The main complexity was fitting all seven numbers (up to six blanks) within the larger Blue group.

Step 1

I initially tackled the right side near Orange 13 but ended up with an incorrect number of pips for the Blue group. I had to rethink my approach and filled that entire group first, using the 4/6 to connect to Orange 13. I then spread the remaining three dominoes onto other blue tiles.

Step 2

Next, I placed a 2/3 domino from the free tile to Orange 13, followed by a 3/4 domino from the dark blue to Orange 13.

Solution

In the end, I slotted a 6/1 domino from Pink 6 into Purple, while the 2/6 domino filled in from the last free tile into Purple.

It’s quite a flexible puzzle; there are various potential solutions. While it wasn’t overly hard, it definitely stood out in its uniqueness. What did you think of it?

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