Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Friday, September 26th

It’s Friday! Woohoo! Friday is basically the weekend. In some ways, it’s better than the weekend, because you get to anticipate the weekend. Anticipation takes your impatience and transforms it into pleasure (if you’re not too impatient and ruin the fun). Getting the thing you want is often less satisfying than knowing you’re going to get the thing you want.

Looking for Thursday’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:

Well, this isn’t much a shape. Kind of a squarish-blob, maybe, with no super obvious place to start. The big clue we have here is the Purple 22 group, which requires two six pips and two five pips. The second thing we know for sure is that the Pink = group on the top right will require blank dominoes, since that’s the only option with four, which means the lower left Pink = group will need 4’s.

Step 1

I started by filling in the Purple 22 group. The 5/5 domino goes on the bottom, with the 6/0 domino jutting up into Pink = and the 6/2 domino going up into the free tile.

Next, I placed the 2/4 domino from Blue 2 into Pink = and the 4/1 domino from Pink = into the Green <2 tile.

Step 2

I finished off the Pink = group in the lower left corner by placing the 4/3 up into Dark Blue ≠, then stuck the 2/5 into Orange 2 and the free tile. Next, I placed the 0/0 domino horizontally in the top right Pink = group, and the 1/0 domino from Purple <2 into Pink =.

Solution

Finally, stick the 3/5 domino from the free tile down into Dark Blue ≠ and the 2/0 domino from the next free tile up into Blue <2 and you’re done!

I screwed up a little at first, trying to put the blank tiles in the bottom left Pink = group but quickly realized nothing else would work in the other Pink = group, so I switched tacts quickly and got this done in short order. How did you do?

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