Hints, Answers And Solutions For Thursday, January 22

It’s Thursday and I’m exhausted from back-to-back hot yoga and personal training and I would prefer to nap all day, quite frankly, but duty calls. Before I can contemplate napping, we have a Pips to solve. Grab a handful of dominos and let’s get to work.

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. 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 definitely took some trial and error, though there is an obvious starting point: The Purple < 2 group has to be two blanks, since there are no 1’s in our stash of dominos. It’s also likely that Purple = (which requires a double) will be 4’s, since we only have two doubles — 4/4 and 6/6 — and with the Green > 16 group, it’s more likely we’ll need those 6’s there. Not entirely necessary, since we have a 6/5 domino as well, but devoting three 6’s to Purple = would stretch us thin.

Step 1

Begin by placing the 0/4 domino from Purple < 2 into Blue 10 and the 0/3 domino from Purple < 2 into Pink 9. Next, place the 6/5 domino from Pink 9 up into Dark Blue = and the 5/3 domino from Dark Blue = into Orange =.

Step 2

Place the 4/4 domino in the left two tiles of Purple = and the 4/3 domino down from Purple = into Orange =. Place the 6/6 domino in the bottom two tiles of Green > 16.

Solution

Next, place the 6/3 domino from Green > 16 into Orange = and the 4/5 domino from the free tile into the Pink > 4 tile. Finally, the 6/2 domino slots into Blue 10 up to the second and last free tile. And we’re done!

Kind of tricky, like I said, and I definitely had to toy around with figuring out what went into Dark Blue = and Orange = for a minute, but as with all Pips, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

How’d you do on today’s Pips? Let me know!

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