Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Tuesday, March 3

Another Tuesday, another trio of Pips puzzles to solve. Today’s Medium is surprisingly tricky, and today’s Hard Pips requires an extra bit of strategy in the beginning. Let’s grab a handful of dominos and get to work!

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:

We had a very similar Hard Pips on the first of this month, so I was a little surprised to see another, though I quite like this style of Pips. A few useful details about this one:

• All the single tiles on this board are either free tiles, 0’s, 2’s, 3’s or 4’s. The only 5 is a group with 5 tiles on it. This means that all our 1’s have to go in Pink 5 and all our 5’s (of which there are 5) go in the 5 free tiles.
• It’s interesting, because the number 5 is only on the grid once, for the 5-tile Pink group, but there are lots of 5’s that go into the solving of this puzzle.

Step 1

Start by filling Pink 5. Do this by placing the 1/5 domino from Pink 5 to the first free tile just to the left. Below that, place the 1/0 domino from Pink 5 into Green 0 and the 1/3 domino from Pink 5 into Orange 3. The 1/2 domino goes from Pink 5 over into Dark Blue 2 and the 1/4 domino goes from Pink 5 down into Purple 4.

Step 2

With that out of the way, it’s time to fill in the free tiles. Normally, I say save the free tiles for the last, but since we know all of these have to be 5’s, we have an edge. One is already filled in. Next, go to the bottom right. Since these two spots have only one option each, it’s a good place to start. Place the 3/4 domino from Pink 3 into the free tile below it and the 4/5 domino next to that, from Blue 4 into the next free tile.

Move up and place the 0/5 domino from Orange 0 into the upper right free tile. Next, place the 5/2 domino from the final free tile over into Dark Blue 2.

Solution

At this point we’ll just fill in the remaining dominos:

• Beginning on the left side of the grid, place the 3/0 domino from Dark Blue 3 into Purple 0.
• Place the 4/3 domino above that from Pink 4 into Blue 3.
• The 2/4 domino goes above that, from Purple 2 to Pink 4.
• The 0/2 domino goes to the right of that, from Blue 0 into Orange 2.
• The 2/3 domino goes all the way in the top right corner, from Dark Blue 2 into Green 3.
• Finally, place the 0/4 domino from Blue 0 up into Green 4 and you’re done. That’s all, folks!

This style of Hard Pips is completely impossible unless you really map things out from the get-go. There are too many possible ways to place a lot of the dominos, so you need to find the ones that can only fit one way. Sometimes you’ll have to rearrange some things when you make incorrect assumptions. Still, these are very doable if you stick with their logic.

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

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