NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Answers, And Walkthrough For Monday, December 8

Another Monday, three more Pips puzzles to solve on the NYT Games App. We’ve had a lot of variety just in terms of difficulty with these lately. A couple days ago was one of the hardest Pips I’ve ever played. Yesterday was a breeze. What will today’s have in store? Let’s find out . . . .

Looking for Sunday’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. 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:

We have a capital “O” and a small “o” for today’s Hard Pips. The main clues, right off the bat, is the fact that we need all of our 5’s and 6’s (we have three of each) in the two Purple groups (21 and 12). We’ll need to use 2’s in the Pink = group and, obviously, 0’s in the Orange 0 group. We’ll start on the baby “o” and go from there.

Step 1

Place the 0/0 domino in the top left of the Orange 0 group and the 0/4 down from Orange 0 into the Dark Blue = group. Where I screwed up on this Pips was trying 0/1 here with 1/2 down into Pink = but this didn’t work. Place the 4/2 domino from Dark Blue = into Pink = and the 2/2 to the left of that in the next two Pink = tiles.

Step 2

Moving to the left “O” place the 2/5 domino from the free tile into Purple 21, the 5/5 domino in the next two Purple 21 tiles and the 6/3 domino from Purple 21 down into Blue > 2. The 2/6 domino goes into the next free tile down into Purple 12 and the 6/0 domino lays across Purple 12 into the Blue = group.

Solution

Place the 0/1 domino from Blue = into Green = and the 1/4 domino from Green = up into Pink 7. Next up, the 3/0 domino goes from Pink 7 into the second-to-last free tile and hop back over to the little “0” and place the 2/1 domino from Pink = up into the final free tile. And that’s a wrap!

I don’t think this one has any alternative solutions, but I could be wrong. Maybe you figured this out a different way.

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