NYT Pips Answers For Thursday, September 10

How To Play Pips

In Pips, you have a grid of multi=-colored 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

• = 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.
• 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:

7 + 0 = 7 is today’s Hard Pips, and it’s really a useful math lesson also. I learned something today. Actually, I learned that today’s Hard Pips is actually super easy. The tricky part is knowing where the doubles go. The Pink 15 in the top left will make you want to spend your 5’s, but that’s not correct. The Blue = in the middle could also be 5’s but that’s not correct, either. I admit to some trial and error here. We’ll start with the “0” and we’ll save our 5’s. We will need them later.

Step 1

Place the 0/2 from Dark Blue 0 into Blue = and the 2/2 in the next two Blue = tiles. The 2/1 goes from Blue = into Orange 2 and the 1/0 goes from Orange 2 into Dark Blue 0.

Step 2

Hop up to the first “7” and place the 0/6 domino from Purple 0 into Pink 15 and the 5/4 domino in the remaining Pink 15 tiles. The 1/3 domino goes from Green

Solution

Move to the plus sign and place the 0/3 domino from Dark Blue 0 into Green > 2 and the 6/2 domino from Orange > 3 into Blue 4 and the 0/0 domino fills in the Blue

Have a thankful Thursday, Pipsqueaks!

How’d you do on today’s Pips?

New Bonus Weekly NYT Games Update

The New York Times launched a new weekly suit of bonus puzzle games for subscribers this week, and the first batch has freebies for non-subscribers also. You can read all about the new twists on the beloved games here, and watch my interview with NYT Games chief, Jonathan Knight below:

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