Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Thursday, August 28th

Everyone is playing the latest New York Times puzzle, Pips, and you should be, too. I suppose you probably are if you’re here reading this guide, but just in case you stumbled on this page and you haven’t tried out Pips yet, read on for a quick tutorial and help with today’s puzzle.

I’ve been enjoying the simple but elegant design of this pastel dominoes game. It’s a nice change of pace from word-puzzles like the Crossword, Strands and Wordle, balancing visual and math puzzle without leaning too hard into either. There’s even a secret word hidden in today’s Pips, which we’ll get to in a minute.

Looking for Tuesday’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 can 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 “more than.” 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 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. Play today’s Pips puzzle here.

Today’s Pips Solution

I’m going to just post the solution for Easy and Medium, then go into a bit more detail and depth on Difficult. Spoilers ahead.

Easy

Medium

Difficult

Okay, let’s dive into the Difficult tier for today’s Pips. This is what the puzzle looks like today:

This is a unique PIPS in that it’s two separate puzzles in one. Today’s Pips is brought to you by the number 17 apparently! Lots of groups that must total a certain number: 17, 9, 1, 7, 6 and a couple of 0’s. Only one > tile and one < tile (my biggest mistake so far in Pips is getting these backwards!)

So where to begin? I decided I’d focus on the pink 1 tile and the dark blue 17 group first, along with the green 9 group. The only way to make 17 out of three tiles was two 6’s and one 5. So I found the 5/1 domino and put it in dark blue and pink, then added the double 6 domino to the 17 group. The only way to make 9 at this point was to use the 5/4 domino, like so:

From here I moved to the second half of the puzzle before finishing the first. It’s kind of like the principle of screwing in something with opposing points. You don’t want to screw everything into one side, you want to balance it out so that you make sure it all fits evenly.

Based on the structure of this side, I knew the top and bottom right tiles had to be full dominoes, so I plugged the 1/0 domino into the <2 orange block and the double blank into the 0 dark blue group. Then I put placed the 6/2 domino into the orange/blue tiles at the bottom, like so:

I screwed up briefly by reading the >1 pink tile as “less than” and had to make an adjustment, but at this point it was smooth sailing. I plugged the 1/1 domino into the purple = tiles on the left and the 2/0 domino into the blue/purple tiles on the right. Then I wrapped up the blue 7 group with the 3/0 domino and plugged the 2/3 into the pink >1 tile. It could have gone either way, which is a good reminder that these do have more than one solution sometimes. This is the completed puzzle:

Check it out, these puzzles lined up spell the word LOVE:

All told, a moderately challenging Pips today with a fun secret message. All you need is love, after all.

How did you do on your Pips puzzles today? Do you feel like you’re getting the hang of this game? I like how it’s pretty simple but still makes you think. I imagine we’ll get some super challenging puzzles in the future.

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