NYT Pips Answers For Wednesday, September 8

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:

ALT is our Hard Pips today. As in “Alternative Music” or an “Alt lifestyle” or a button on your keyboard. The edgier, darker button. The antithesis of CTRL. In any case, the “T” is where we’ll begin because only one domino can squeeze into the Dark Blue > 3 tile and up into Purple 11, and from there we can pretty quickly see the steps that need to be taken.

Step 1

Place the 6/5 domino from Dark Blue > 3 into Purple 11 and the 6/0 domino from Purple 11 into Green =. The 0/1 domino goes from Green = up into Pink = and the 3/1 domino goes next to that, from Blue 3 into Pink =. Finish off the “T” with the 1/1 domino in the remaining Pink = tiles.

Step 2

Scoot on over to the “A” and place the 4/2 domino from Blue > 3 into Dark Blue 2 and the 0/0 domino horizontally above that. The 0/5 domino goes from Dark Blue 0 into the second Purple 11 group and the 6/2 domino goes from Purple 11 into the one and only free tile.

Solution

The third > 3 tile is Pink and we’ll put the 4/3 domino from there into Orange = and the 3/3 tile will fill in the remaining Orange = tiles. Now we can leap over to the “L” and pop the 1/5 domino from Purple 1 into Green 13. The 4/4 domino finishes up Green 13 and the 22/ domino snuggles into Orange = and wraps up this Hard Pips!

Have an wicked Wednesday, 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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