NYT Pips Answers And Walkthrough For Sunday, October 4

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:

Today’s Hard Pips has a very handy starting point, but it’s still a tricky puzzle, especially about midway through when there are so many different ways you could place various dominoes. The obvious starting point is also what gets you hung up later: The Pink 3 in the bottom left can only be fulfilled by the 0/3 domino, but then you have a Purple 3 pair and an Orange 3 pair later on that will trip you up if you’re not careful. We also have a 6/3 domino which we know has to go from Dark Blue > 5 up into the first free tile, since that’s the only domino greater than 5 and it can’t go over into Green ≠ Let’s dive right in.

Step 1

Place the two dominoes I mentioned above and then put the 4/4 domino in the base of Dark Blue =. The 4/3 domino goes above that into Purple 3 and the 2/0 domino goes from Green 2 into Purple 3.

Step 2

Here’s where you can get into some trouble (or at least I did) by trying to make the Pink 8 with two dominoes. Instead, place the 5/3 domino in these tiles and then place the 1/0 domino from Blue

The Solution

I was saving Purple ≠ because I wasn’t sure yet which domino would go here, but you can just put the 4/5 here since that’s what you’ll need. Next, place the 2/4 domino from Blue = into the next free tile and the 0/5 domino from Purple 0 into the final free tile. The 1/5 domino goes from Orange

Have a soothing Sunday, Pipsqueaks!

How’d you do on today’s Pips?

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