Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Thursday, September 18th

It’s Thursday and I am incredibly sore and tired after really hitting the weights and the yoga mat hard this week. Sore is good! It takes pain to reduce pain, or at least that’s my experience with exercise. We must exercise our minds as well, and what better way to do that than with a fun puzzle game about placing dominoes in the correct tiles. Come along, my Pipsqueaks, let’s solve today’s Pips!

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. Play today’s Pips puzzle here.

Today’s Pips Solution

Below are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tier Pips. After that, I’ll walk you through the Difficult puzzle. Spoilers ahead.

Easy

Medium

Difficult

Let’s do a complete walkthrough of today’s Difficult Pips. It starts out like this:

I suppose the NYT Games setters are making a statement with today’s Pips. “L” is for “loser” right? Are they calling us losers? I jest, of course. But we needn’t take an “L” today. This one is pretty straightforward.

Step 1

We know two things about today’s puzzle. First, the Blue = group requires 5 pips of the same number, and the only number that fits that bill is 2. Second, we have two groups that require a total of 10, which means either a 4 and a 6 or two 5’s. We only have four 5’s and one of those is likely needed for the Pink >4 group, so we can assume that one of the 10 groups will require a 6 and a 4.

I started things off placing the 5/1 domino in Pink >4 into Purple 2 and the 2/1 domino from Blue = into Purple 2.

Step 2

I wanted to fill in the entire row of Blue = so I placed the 2/4 domino from Blue = into Orange >3, the 2/5 domino from Blue = into Dark Blue 10, the 5/0 domino from Dark Blue 10 into Pink 0, and finally the 2/2 domino into the remaining two tiles of Blue =.

Final Step

Most of the “L” is now complete. The only way to get the Green 2 group done now is with the 1/1 domino. We now have a Purple 10 and a Blue = group to finish up, along with two free tiles. I placed the 4/0 from Purple 10 into a free tile, the 6/3 domino from Purple 10 into the Blue = and the 5/3 domino from the final free tile into Blue =, and that’s a wrap!

This only took me about twenty seconds longer than the Medium Pips today, which was harder than a normal Medium Pips, while this Hard puzzle was definitely on the easier side. How did you do?

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