Today’s NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Solution And Walkthrough For Friday, November 14

Another day, another trio of Pips puzzles to solve. The Hard Pips is an interesting one today, but not the most challenging we’ve seen. Let’s grab our bag of dominoes and get to solving this thing!

Looking for Wednesday’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. Sometimes there’s only one way to solve the puzzle. Other times, there can be two or more different solutions. 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:

I’ve had this whole numbers theory about the shapes of recent Pips and this could, I suppose, be the number 12 — but it’s a stretch. In any case, the obvious place to start with this Hard Pips is the Purple = group. Every other group is the number 5, and this is a group of 5 tiles that can’t contain the number 5, because there aren’t enough dominoes with 5’s.

Step 1

We’ll begin by placing the double 0/0 in the top left of Purple = and the 0/5 from Purple = into the Pink 5 tile. The 0/2 and 0/3 dominoes can go in either of the Purple = tiles down into either of the Dark Blue 5 tiles.

Step 2

The 5/4 domino goes from Blue 5 into Orange 5. Next place the 0/1 domino in the remaining two Orange 5 tiles and the 5/1 domino from Purple 5 into Green 5.

Solution

The 4/2 domino slots from Green 5 down into the next Orange 5 group and the 3/1 domino goes from Orange 5 over into the free tile. Finally the 2/2 and 3/3 dominoes can go in either of the Pink 5 or Blue 5 locations so long as each adds up to 5!

Not too tricky, but all those 5’s meant you could get mixed up pretty easily and I did have to rearrange my dominoes once.

How did you do on today’s Pips? Did anyone find a different solution?

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