Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Sunday, September 21st

It’s the last full day of summer, Pipsqueaks, so make the most of it. Tomorrow at 11:19 am PT / 2:19 pm ET we take summer out back and put it down. Fall rises. Regime change in the cyclical war of the seasons. That means you have just one more summer Pips to solve. Let’s get to it!

Looking for Saturday’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 fun Pips and it actually reminds me of some of the Mini Crosswords I’ve played in the past. It looks a little like the original Crossword Puzzle actually, though this would make an even harder Pips:

In any case, it’s a cool shape and different from anything we’ve seen.

Step 1

There are a few things we can establish early on. We have several double dominoes and I like these for the outside Purple =, Green 0 and Blue 10 groups. Obviously we can’t use a double on the left side, as that’s a Green 3 tile and an Orange >4 tile.

We also have a big Pink ≠ group in the middle and that Dark Blue 18 that we know requires all 6’s. We’ll start by placing the 5/5 domino in Blue 10, the 4/4 domino in Purple = and the 0/0 domino in the Green 0 group. Based on the remaining 6’s, I know one will need to go in Pink ≠ down into Green 0 and one will need to go in Pink 1 up into Dark Blue 18. That leaves us with the 3/6 which I’m guessing will work for the left-side Green 3 tile and Orange >4 tile. Like so:

Step 2

Next, we’ll place the 1/6 domino from Pink 1 into Dark Blue 18 and the 6/6 domino in the remaining Dark Blue 18 squares. We have a Purple 4, so we’ll place the 4/3 domino there up into Pink ≠. There’s a Pink 3 that we can use the 3/1 on dropping down into Purple <4.

Solution

That leaves us with just four more dominoes. The 1/2 slots into Orange 1 down into Pink ≠. We’ll do the same with the 5/4 domino from Blue 5 into Pink ≠.

Finally, the 0/6 domino goes where I noted earlier, in the Green 0 tile up into Pink ≠ group, leaving us with a 2/5 domino that slots into Dark Blue 2 up into Pink ≠. And that’s a wrap!

This is another one of those Pips where I wasn’t 100% sure I was on the right track at first and just kind of made some educated guesses to get started. I had to juggle things once or twice when I played, but it was easy enough in the end. A fun one—not too hard, not too difficult. How did you do?

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