NYT Pips Hints, Walkthrough And Solutions — Saturday, October 18

Another Saturday, another Pips to solve. It’s the weekend, but that doesn’t mean you get a break—or, well, I suppose you could take a break but it’s a Pips a day for me, come hell or high water, rain or shine. We have some dominoes to lay down, so let’s get right to it!

Looking for Friday’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 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

Today’s Medium Pips is as tricky as many Hard Pips, so I’ll do a quick walkthrough. Here’s what it looks like blank:

Step 1

While there’s no obvious starting point here, you definitely don’t want to start on the little secondary area with the Purple >4 tile. That’s too open-ended. A better place to start is on the right side where we have an Orange 0 group. We know every tile in that group has to be blank. Still, we’ll start below that with the 1/6 domino going from Purple 2 into the free tile and the 1/4 domino going from Purple 2 into Green 10. Next, the 0/0 domino goes into the right side of Orange 0 and the 0/6 domino slots down from Orange 0 into Green 10.

Step 2

The 5/5 domino goes in the 2 Blue 10 boxes. Next, the 2/4 domino lays across Pink <4 into Dark Blue 10 and the 6/3 domino goes from Dark Blue 10 into Pink =. The 3/1 domino goes from Pink = into the free tile, and then we can lay down the 6/6 domino in Blue 12 and the 3/3 domino in Pink =.

Solution

All we have left is the 4/4 domino—which goes into the top two free tiles—and the 5/2 domino—which we can place in Purple >4 over into the final free tile—and we’re done. This definitely felt more like an easier Hard Pips than a Medium Pips.

Today’s Hard Pips

Here’s today’s Hard Pips:

Once again, I have no shape to make from this Pips. It’s pretty abstract. You could almost make it a man wearing a hat, but not quite.

Step 1

The best place to start today are the two Pink groups. Pink 8 has to be 4/4, which leaves us with 6/6 for the bottom Pink = group.

Step 2

We know the Blue 29 group needs to be mostly 6’s with one 5 in the mix. Start by placing the 6/4 domino from Blue 29 into Green >3 and the 6/1 domino from Blue 29 into Dark Blue 3. Next, the 6/5 domino can go either direction in the top right tiles of Blue 29 and the 6/2 domino goes up from Blue 29 into Purple ≠. This is important, because we need five different pips to fill Purple ≠ so placement here really matters. You’ll want to use the 6/2 because we need the other 2’s for later.

Step 3

The 4/2 domino goes from the left free tile up into Dark Blue 3. The 1/0 domino goes from the next free tile up into Purple 7. The 5/2 domino can go either direction in the remaining two tiles of Purple 7.

Solution

This leaves us with two more dominoes to lay down. You can place the 5/0 and 4/1 domino wherever in the final Purple ≠ group, but this is how I did it:

A reasonably challenging puzzle simply because there were a lot of spots you could place dominoes that would then leave you with too many of one pips or another in the final Purple ≠ group. Still, I wouldn’t call this much trickier than today’s Medium Pips! How did you do?

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