Today’s NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Solution And Walkthrough For Wednesday, November 12

Another day, another trio of Pips puzzles to solve. Over at my Wednesday Wordle guide I also have an extra riddle for readers to solve, if you’re in the mood for an extra challenge (I do these every “Wordle Wednesday”). Over here, of course, we have dominoes to set and some colorful tiles to fill. Let’s dive right in!

Looking for Tuesday’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:

This is the number “7” obviously, after yesterday’s number “6” and I’m not sure if we’re just counting or this is a secret code (see below). There’s no super obvious place to start and I had to fiddle with this for awhile before I made it make sense. Here’s how I went about solving today’s Hard Pips.

Step 1

We have three different numbers that could fit in the three 4-tile = groups: 1’s, 2’s, and 3’s. The question is, which goes where? What worked for me (and your solution may vary) is to start with the 1/1 domino in Purple = in the two left vertical tiles. Then place the 1/0 domino from Purple = down into Blue = and the 2/1 domino from Pink = into Purple =. We’ll finish off the Blue = group with the 2/0 from Pink = into Blue=.

Step 2

Next, place the 2/4 domino from Pink = into Orange > 2 and the 2/3 domino from Pink = into Dark Blue =. The 6/6 domino will take up both Green = tiles.

Solution

This leaves us with the 3/3 domino in the next two Dark Blue = tiles and the 3/1 domino from Dark Blue = into the free tile. Not too bad! One tricky thing about this Pips is that the 2’s really could feed in both directions from Pink = so you could easily have the Purple be 3’s and the Dark Blue be 1’s and it seems to make sense — until you get to that Blue = group.

So this being a “7” confirms that I’m onto something with a sequence of numbers. Here’s what we’ve seen over the last few days:

Now we have a “7” and a sequence of 0-2-4-5-6-7 unless I just didn’t see the “1” and “3” in there. Maybe these are just counting up and one of the Pips from earlier in the week was a horizontal “3” (one kind of looked like it could be, but it’s a stretch. Something is afoot, regardless.

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

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