NYT Pips Hints, Walkthrough And Solutions For Saturday, November 1

Having trouble with today’s NYT Pips puzzle? Or maybe you’d just like to compare your solution to mine, since many of these lately have had multiple ways to solve them. Either way, I have the solutions for the Easy and Medium tiers below (Medium was kind of tricky today) and a walkthrough for today’s very challenging Hard Pips puzzle. On we go, Pipsqueaks!

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

Hard Pips Walkthrough And Solution

Here’s today’s Hard Pips:

Spaceship. Today’s Pips is 100% a spaceship. As I noted recently, these are usually dogs or spaceships and day after day the NYT Games prove me right. This is quite a gnarly-looking spaceship, too, and a very daunting Pips!

There’s no super obvious place to begin, partly because while we know the Blue = group on the right will require a double, we don’t know what that double will be. The Purple 3 group on the left will almost certainly need the double blank domino because we only have a single 1 pip out of all 14 dominoes, and that needs to go in Pink 1. That would mean a 3 would go in the third Purple 3 spot, but we don’t know which 3 domino should go there.

Instead, we’ll begin in the bottom left of this Pips.

Step 1

I began with the 1/2 domino and first I tried it with the 2 going into Blue = at the bottom. You can make this work, and you can get 2’s in those tiles and 5’s in the Dark Blue = group and so on and so forth but eventually I hit a wall and had to start over.

Instead, I placed the 1/2 from Pink 1 into the green = group, then used the 2/2 domino to fill in the next two tiles. I placed the 4/4 domino directly below that in Blue = and the 4/3 domino from Blue = up into Purple 3. So far, so good.

Step 2

We’ll finish up Blue = with the 4/5 domino up into Dark Blue =. The 2/5 domino slots into Orange 2 and up into Dark Blue = and then we’ll move to the next Blue = group and lay the 3/3 domino at the top, with the 3/5 domino from Blue = into Dark Blue =. So many = groups in this puzzle!

Solution

Moving across the board, we’ll drop the 0/0 domino into Purple 3 and the 3/6 domino from Purple 3 into Orange =. The 6/6 domino slots next to that one (and notice we now have three double dominoes stacked on top of one another). The 6/2 domino goes from Orange = into Pink 4 and we’ll wrap this puppy (sorry spaceship) up with the 0/2 domino from the single free tile into Pink 4.

This was quite challenging and required me to try out a couple different approaches. I’m very curious if there are alternative solutions to this one, as we do have so many = groups, double dominoes and large quantities of 4’s, 2’s, 6’s, 5’s and 3’s.

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