Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Wednesday, September 24th

Another day, another Pips puzzle to solve, and I know just the Pipsqueaks to get the job done. Yes, I’m talking about you, dearest readers. We shall lay down some dominoes and emerge victorious this fine autumn day!

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 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. Play today’s Pips puzzle here.

Today’s Pips Solution

Below are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tier Pips. After that, I’ll walk you through the Difficult puzzle. Spoilers ahead.

Easy

Medium

Difficult

Let’s do a complete walkthrough of today’s Difficult Pips. It starts out like this:

Today’s Easy Pips was a square. The Medium was two squares together. The Hard is a small square and a big square. Maybe if you string them together it’s a freight truck or a caterpillar, or it’s pictures from a children’s book. One square, two squares, three squares four!

In any case, this is a bit of a difficult Pips simply because it’s hard to know where to begin. Should we start on the big square or the little square? What clues are available? A few things worth noting:

The Purple = has to be 3’s. We know this because the only other Pips with enough tiles are the 5’s, but we need them to make the Pink 10 group work. We know this because we only have one domino with 4’s and it’s a double and it needs to go in the Dark Blue 4 tile, and thus cannot be used to pair with a 6 and make Pink 10 work. We have an extra 3 domino, however, so more than enough to make Purple = work.

Step 1

I started by placing the 1/3 domino in Orange 1 into the large Blue ≠ group. This group requires 6 different Pips, which makes it a bit daunting. I then placed the 4/4 domino from Dark Blue 4 into Blue ≠ and the 6/1 domino from Orange 6 into Blue ≠. That’s three out of 6 for the Blue ≠ group.

Now I focused on finishing up Pink 10. I placed the 3/5 from Purple = into Pink 10 and the 5/5 domino from Pink 10 into Blue ≠. Then I placed the 3/3 domino into the Purple = group.

Step 2

Next, I placed the 3/2 domino from Purple = into Blue ≠ and the 0/6 domino from Pink <1 into the last Blue ≠ tile. All that’s left is the little box.

Step 3

Solution

With two dominoes left, this was easy. The 2/2 domino slotted into the Green = group and I placed the 5/1 domino from the free tile into Purple <1. Earlier, I had tried to place these sooner and had to redo some stuff, but overall this went pretty smoothly.

All told, a fun and moderately challenging Hard Pips today. How did you do?

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