NYT Pips Hints, Walkthrough And Solutions For Friday, Oct 31

It’s a very spooky day for the NYT Games section. The Connections has a special puzzle today with pictures instead of words (and yes, one of them is a pumpkin) and the NYT Strands puzzle is all orange and purple. Sadly, today’s Pips puzzles really don’t have anything particularly Halloween-themed, which is strange given how easy it would be to make a pumpkin-shaped Hard Pips. C’est la vie!

If you’re looking for help with today’s Pips, or want to compare solutions and see if you got something different from me, scroll on down. The answers for the Easy and Medium Pips are next, with a full walkthrough for today’s Hard Pips.

Looking for Thursday’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 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:

I know it’s a stretch, but I’m calling this one a dog. Dogs and spaceships, that’s what most Pips puzzles look like to me. This is a dainty little pup, though very tall and not very long, with an orange nose.

Only 9 dominoes today, and no really large groups. The Purple 16 could be made a variety of ways, but I’m pretty sure only 6’s can work in the Blue = group since no other number has a total of five other than 6’s.

Step 1

I started by placing the 5/5 domino at the very top of Purple 16 and the 1/5 domino below that. With that group out of the way, I popped the 2/0 domino from the free tile into Orange < 2.

Step 2

I placed the 2/6 domino from Pink > 1 over into Blue 6. I always try to use a number that isn’t that much greater or lesser than the designation, though certainly that’s not always the right call.

Next, I placed two doubles. The 6/6 filled the next two Blue = tiles and the 4/4 went in two of the Dark Blue = tiles.

Solution

I placed the 6/4 domino from Blue = into Dark Blue = and the 6/1 domino from Blue = into the second free tile. I wrapped up today’s Pips with the 4/1 domino from Green > 3 into the final free tile.

This was . . . very easy. Medium-tier easy and honestly not much more challenging than today’s Medium Pips. I guess that’s fine. We don’t want to spend too much time on a puzzle when we have to get our costumes ready and buckets of candy set up for the trick-or-treaters. Have a happy Halloween and let me know if you solved this a different way on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Be sure to follow me for all your daily puzzle-solving guides, TV show and movie reviews and more here on this blog!