How To Solve Today’s NYT Pips Puzzles, Wednesday August 26

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 < 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:

Today’s Hard Pips is the letter “U” and its little cousin “u” as in “underwhelming” or “underdog” or “uvula” or Uther Pendragon. It’s a bit tricky, but I made some lucky assumptions. First, when I the two different 6 groups, I figured we’d be using a lot of 2 pips up, and second I figured we’d most likely need the double in the bottom Dark Blue 6 group since it borders Orange 0 and Purple 0, and there aren’t going to be many 2/0 dominoes to choose from.

Step 1

With that in mind, play the 2/6 domino from Purple 6 into Pink 6 and the 2/4 domino directly below that from Purple 6 into Dark Blue 10. The 2/3 goes down from Purple 6 into Pink = and the 6/0 goes down from Dark Blue 10 into Orange 0.

Step 2

We’ll kill off three doubles in a row now: 3/3 goes into Pink =, 2/2 into the next two slots of Dark Blue 6 and 0/0 above that in Orange 0. Next, place the 2/0 domino from Dark Blue 6 into Purple 0.

Step 3

The 0/3 domino goes from Orange 0 up into BLue 9 and the 5/5 domino goes next to that in Green =. The 3/5 goes from Blue 9 over into Green = and the 3/6 goes from Blue 9 into Orange > 3. Now we can move to the little “u”.

Solution

Place the 0/1 domino from Pink < 2 into Orange 1 and the 1/4 domino from Orang 1 into Dark Blue =. The 4/4 domino goes into the nxt slot and the 4/65d omino sits above that. And you’re done!

Have a wondrous Wednesday, Pipsqueaks!

How’d you do on today’s Pips?

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