Today’s NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Solution And Walkthrough For Monday, November 17

Well, my dearest Pipsqueaks, the weekend is over and Monday is back with a vengeance. Here in the mountains, it’s been rainy with the promise of snow. It’s glorious weather. The rain and the yards of fallen leaves. Grey and gold. Quite lovely. In any case, we have an Easy, Medium and Hard Pips puzzle to solve, so let’s get right to it!

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:

Okay, this is obviously a 3, so the numbers just keep coming, though I’m not sure if there’s any hidden code or significance beyond that. They haven’t been in order, having skipped the 1 and the 3 earlier on and then come back to both those in recent days. And if we’re only counting Hard Pips numbers, I believe it’s something like 2, 5, 6, 7, 1, 4, 8, 3 but I might be getting that out of order. In any case, the most obvious place to start here is at the top with the Pink 24 group, since that will use all of our 6’s up.

Step 1

Start by placing the 6/3 domino from Pink 24 into Purple > 2 and the 6/4 domino from Pink 24 into Orange > 3. Next, place the 6/0 domino from Pink 24 into Dark Blue ≠ and the 6/1 domino from Pink 24 into the free tile. (We have a 1/1 domino so I’m assuming this will go from the Blue 1 tile below into Dark Blue ≠). The only thing that will work in the Blue 10 group is the 5/5 domino so put that there.

Step 2

Place the 0/1 domino from Purple 0 into the first Blue 1 tile and both doubles — 2/2 and 3/3 — from their respective Green 2 and Pink 3 tiles into the Dark Blue ≠ group. Next, place the 3/5 domino from Orange 3 into the second free tile.

Solution

The 1/1 domino does, indeed, go from the second Blue 1 tile into Dark Blue ≠ and we can wrap up that Dark Blue Dark Blue ≠ group with the 4/5 domino. Finally, place the 3/0 domino from the Pink 3 tile into the second Purple 0 tile and the 5/2 domino from the Green 5 tile into the final free tile. And that’s a wrap!

This was a tough one, thankfully, as I really do prefer the more challenging Hard Pips — and I think there should be an even harder mode/tier to make things more interesting — but I mostly had this one until I got to the very end. I’d run out of blank pips for the final Purple 0, or so I thought. I had the 3/5 domino from Pink 3 into Green 5 and all I had left was the 2/5 domino. I realized I could move the 3/0 domino from Orange 3 and the free tile over instead and that solved that!

How did you do on today’s Pips? Did anyone find a different solution?

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