NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Answers, And Walkthrough For Thursday, December 4

Another day, another trio of Pips puzzles to solve. The Easy Pips even gave me a bit of trouble today. And, of course, the Hard Pips is yet another letter from the alphabet. Let’s lay some dominoes down, shall we?

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. 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 brought to you by the letter “V” as in “vacation” and “vivacious” and “A vault of very voluminous volumes, bound in violet vellum. Oh to voyage vicariously into voids of vibrant verisimilitude!”

The big clues in this Hard Pips are: The Green 11 group will require the one 6 pip we have in our collection of 12 dominoes. It will also require one of our 5’s. The other 5 will need to go in Blue > 4. The 5/0 or the 5/3 could go there, but we need to be careful with 0’s sine we know that between Orange 0 and Blue 0 we’ll use three of the four 0’s and we’ll need another for the two tiles of Purple 1. So we pretty much have to use 5/3 on the top right.

Step 1

Place the 5/3 domino from Blue > 4 into Pink = and the /43 domino directly below that, from Green > 3 into the Pink = group. We can place the 3/3 domino from Pink = into Dark Blue ≠ and then go ahead and place the 6/4 domino from Green 11 into Dark Blue ≠, like so:

Step 2

When we have ≠ groups, I often find that doubles work really well. We’ve already used the 3/3 this way, but now add the 1/1 from Purple 1 into Dark Blue ≠ and the 0/0 from Blue 0 into Dark Blue ≠. Now, place the 5/0 domino from Green 11 into Orange 0 and the 0/1 domino from Orange = into the Purple 1 tile.

Solution

Next place the 4/4 domino in the bottom two Dark Blue = tiles and the 4/0 up from Dark Blue = into Purple 1. The 2/1 domino goes from Orange > 1 up into Purple 1. Wrap things up by placing the 3/4 domino from Dark Blue ≠ into the singel free tile. And that’s all, foks!

I got a bit mixed up today a few times and had to rearrange a couple dominoes to figure this one out, but I got there eventually. Again, I’d be surprised if anyone was able to find a different solution. Did you?

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