Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Thursday, September 25th

The week is rolling slowly onward and the weekend is inching that much closer. But weekday, weekend — it makes no difference. We have blank tiles to fill and a table of dominoes to place. Let’s solve today’s Pips!

Looking for Wednesday’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. Play today’s Pips puzzle here.

Today’s Pips Solution

Below are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tier Pips. After that, I’ll walk you through the Difficult puzzle. Spoilers ahead.

Easy

Medium

Difficult

Let’s do a complete walkthrough of today’s Difficult Pips. It starts out like this:

This is a deceptively tricky Hard Pips. I really struggled with this one, though part of that was assuming that Pink = was going to be all blanks because I miscounted the 3’s. Oops! Once I’d realized my mistake, I still had trouble figuring this one out. It’s a doozy!

Step 1

What we can surmise based on the Blue 10 group, the Green 7 group and the 6 Purple group is that we’ll need to use most of our larger pips in these groups. We have no 4’s so the Blue 10 group will need both our 5’s.

We also know that the 6’s will have to be placed in the Green 7, Purple 6 and Orange 8 groups. I started off by placing the 5/0 domino from Blue 10 into the free tile and the 5/3 domino from Blue 10 into Pink =. Then I placed the 6/6 domino into the Green 7 group down into Purple 6, like so:

Step 2

I decided to keep working from the top, placing the 2/3 domino from Purple >1 into Pink = and the 0/3 domino from the free tile into Pink =. I wasn’t sure if this would be correct just yet, but I wanted to use up more of those 3’s.

Solution

Now everything fell into place. I stuck the 3/6 domino from Pink = into Orange 8 and the 2/0 domino from Orange 8 into the free tile. The 3/1 domino wen tnext to that, from Pink = down into Dark Blue 2.

The 1/1 domino finished up Dark Blue 2 and Green 7, and the last 0/0 domino slotted into the free tile and over into Purple 6. And that was that!

Like I said, I had to clear the board with this one thanks to beginning with the wrong assumption. I had some parameters correct (needing to place the 5’s in Blue and needing the 6’s to spread out into all the other larger total groups) but trying to make the blank tiles work for Pink = really threw me off and I had to start over completely. How did you do?

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