NYT Pips Hints, Walkthrough And Solutions For Monday, October 20

If you’re looking for a little extra help solving today’s NYT Pips puzzles, you’ve come to the right place. Today’s Hard Pips is interesting because it has several different solutions. Normally, a Pips has just one solution, though a reader recently pointed out that a Pips the other day had a different solution than the one I came up with, so it really just depends.

I also found today’s Medium Pips quite challenging—almost as difficult as today’s Hard Pips. Sometimes it’s like that. Let’s lay down some dominoes, shall we?

Looking for Sunday’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 Hard Pips

Here’s today’s Hard Pips:

With the Easy Pips a “J” and the Medium Pips a “T” I was ready for a third letter. Instead we got a shapeless abstraction. The most challenging thing about today’s Pips is that you’ll need to use all seven numbers—blank though 6—in the big Blue ≠ group.

Step 1

I tried starting on the right side with Orange 13 but this left me with the wrong number of Pips for the Blue ≠ group. I changed tactics and just filled in that entire group first, making sure I used the 4/6 from there up into Orange 13. The other three dominoes could go in any other tiles in the Blue group.

Step 2

Next, I placed the 2/3 domino from the free tile into Orange 13 and the 3/4 domino from Dark Blue >2 up into Orange 13, like so:

Solution

Finally, I slotted the 6/1 domino from Pink 6 into Purple >6 and the 2/6 domino from the last free tile into Purple >6.

As you can see, there are many different ways you could potentially solve this:

All told, not a super challenging Pips but certainly a unique one. How’d you do?

Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Be sure to follow me for all your daily puzzle-solving guides, TV show and movie reviews and more here on this blog!