Hints, Answers And Full Solution For Tuesday, January 20

I hope everyone had a nice holiday Monday, but now we’re back to the grind. Fortunately, we have some fun diversions, like the newest NYT Games App puzzle game, Pips. Let’s grab some dominos and solve today’s Easy, Medium and Hard puzzles!

Looking for Monday’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:

Today’s Hard Pips is a big microscope next to a little microscope, and we’ll have to look at each very carefully to figure out how to make these fifteen dominos fit. There isn’t a really obvious starting point, so I decided to start in the middle with the large Orange = group, which I determined had to be 2’s.

Step 1

Place the 5/2 domino from the Purple 5 tile into Orange = and the 3/2 domino from the Blue 3 tile into Orange =. Next, the 6/2 domino goes from Dark Blue = up into Orange = and the 2/2 domino lays horizontally across two of the Orange = upper tiles.

Step 2

Next, place the 3/6 domino from the Pink < 5 tile into Dark Blue = and the 5/6 domino next to that, from Purple 5 into Dark Blue =. Move up to the top and place the 5/0 domino from the second Dark Blue = group into the Green 0 tile, and the 5/4 domino from Dark Blue = into Blue =.

Step 3

Place the 2/4 domino from the Pink 2 tile into Blue = and the 2/1 domino from the Orange = group into our first free tile. The 6/6 domino goes in the Purple > 8 group at the top, and the 0/0 domino slides into the Green < 2 group at the bottom.

Solution

Moving to the small microscope, you can do this two ways. I placed the 1/1 domino in the Blue < 6 group, the 3/3 domino in the first two tiles of Pink = and the 3/1 domino from Pink = into the second free tile. But you could also do this backwards, with the 3’s and 1’s swapped and it will also work. There may even be other solutions!

How’d you do on today’s Pips? Let me know!

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