If you’re tackling the latest challenges from the New York Times’ Pips today, you’ve come to the right place. This article provides everything you require to navigate today’s puzzles, including a detailed walkthrough for the hardest one.
Playing Pips: A Quick Overview
Pips is a colorful grid-based puzzle where each color signifies a distinct condition to satisfy. Utilizing a limited set of dominoes, players must fill in the grid while adhering to the specified requirements. The puzzles come in levels of Easy, Medium, and Hard.
For instance, a challenging grid can look quite intricate:
In this grid, you will see symbols and numbers representing different colored areas. For example, the three purple squares must be unequal, while the two pink squares should sum to zero. To fit the dominoes correctly, players can rotate them as needed.
Conditions vary, and they include:
- = All pips must be equal within this group.
- ≠ All pips should differ within this group.
- > The pip in this tile must be greater than a specified number.
- < The pip in this tile must be less than a specific figure.
- An exact number (like 6) The pip must match this exact number.
- Unconditional tiles can represent any value.
To successfully solve the puzzle, players need to employ all dominoes while satisfying all conditions; sometimes a puzzle may have a single solution, while other times multiple solutions may exist.
Solutions and Walkthrough for Today’s Pips
Here are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tiers of today’s puzzles. Following that, I’ll guide you through solving the Hard puzzle. Caution: Spoilers are ahead!
Easy Pips Solutions
Medium Pips Solutions
Hard Pips Walkthrough and Solutions
Here’s the challenge for today’s Hard Pips:
Today’s Hard Pips features a ≠ condition, which means you’ll likely make use of multiple doubles. Notably, the bottom left corner showcases a 2 and a 3 tile next to each other, implying that separate dominoes will be needed to satisfy those conditions. This insight is crucial for strategizing your approach.
Step 1
Begin by placing the 2/2 domino from Green 2 into the Orange ≠ slot. Follow this with the 4/4 domino from Dark Blue 4 into the same slot. Position the 5/5 domino from the leftmost Orange ≠ into Blue 10, followed by the 5/3 from Blue 10 into Pink 3. Finish this step by placing the 2/0 domino from Purple 2 into Blue =.
Step 2
Position the 0/5 domino from Blue = into Orange > 4, and the 0/3 from Blue = into Dark Blue < 4. The 0/4 domino completes the second-largest = group by going from Blue = into Green 4. Next, position the 4/1 domino from Purple 4 into Pink =, followed by the 1/1 domino in the subsequent Pink = tiles.
Solution
Finish off by placing the 1/0 domino from Pink = into Blue 0, and the 1/3 domino from Pink = into Purple 6. Lastly, complete the puzzle with the 6/2 domino from Pink > 2 into the only remaining space.
How did you fare with today’s Pips puzzles?