Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Sunday, September 7th

Another Sunday, another Pips to solve. This one was tricky! I had more trouble with the Medium tier today than I think I’ve ever had, and the Difficult tier had me stumped for a spell also. At least the Easy tier was super easy . . . . Let’s dive right in!

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:

As you can see, this sort of looks like a dog. The Easy is a stick, the Medium is a frisbee or a bowl, and the Difficult is a doggo. That’s my take, anyways. But where to start?

The most obvious place is the dog’s bag foot. There’s an Orange 1 tile next to a Blue 0 group, and that’s a pretty specific condition. I placed the 1/0 domino there and the 0/2 domino up into the Purple <3 group like so:

At this point, however, I was good and properly stumped. We have so many conditions to consider! There are two = groups up on the back/tail portion of the dog. The front foot is a Pink >15 group (that I glanced at and thought was an = group, which screwed me up at one point). We have a Dark Blue ≠ to consider. Woof.

I tried a few things here, and I got it pretty badly wrong starting at the dog’s head and moving down that way. So I cleared the board (other than the first two tiles) and focused on the central area and front foot instead. I placed the 0/3 tile from Purple <3 up into Green = and the 0/4 tile from Green = into Dark Blue ≠. Then I filled the Pink >15 group with the double 5/5 domino and the 5/2 domino up into Dark Blue ≠ like so:

So far, so good but we’re not out of the weeds yet.

At this point, I was operating under the assumption that Green = had to be 3’s and I noticed that I still had a 4/4 domino. The Pink = group (the tail) required a double so I placed that there and then placed the 3/4 domino from Green into Pink.

I needed to finish the Green = group so I placed the 3/5 domino from Green into Dark Blue ≠ and then finished that group by placing the 3/2 domino from Dark Blue ≠ into Orange 6. This left just the head of the dog.

The rest of the groups were total numbers which is one reason starting there was a bad idea in the first place. Too many ways to complete total number groups. Fortunately, at this point I only had a few dominoes left. I placed the 4/1 domino into Orange 6, completing that, with the 1 going up into Blue 2. I placed the 1/5 from Blue 2 into Purple 10 and the last domino, a 5/2 chip, from Purple 10 into the open tile. That did the trick!

It’s possible that this is a cat, but I’m more of a dog person. Besides, if Easy is a stick, that makes no sense for a cat. One of the many shortcomings of the feline species is its disinterest in playing fetch. Sure, you can get a cat to chase a laser and that’s pretty funny, and I guess the Easy tier could be a laser. But I’m going with dog. What a good puppy!

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