Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Tuesday, September 30th

At last, we’ve come to the final day of September. We’re in the fall country now. Here comes Halloween, everybody run and scream. It’s just a month way, oh my Pipsqueaks. Let’s solve today’s Pips!

Looking for Monday’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:

I’m calling today’s Pips a porcupine. It has big spiky things coming off the top of its back, so I think it’s a fitting enough description.

Step 1

The porcupine’s quills are a good place to start. We know that the Pink 8 has to be a double 4 since there’s no 2/6 domino. And we know the Purple 11 has to be a 5/6 domino. We’ll place those first. Then we’ll place the 3/5 domino from Pink 3 into Dark Blue 5 in the porcupine’s back leg. I placed the 0/0 domino from Green 0 at the snout, down into Orange 2.

Step 2

This next step was the most difficult. Either Blue = or Dark Blue = has to be a double domino, but which double is not as clear. I experimented with placing the 6/6 domino from Orange 6 into Blue 1 but quickly realized that I wouldn’t have big enough pips remaining for the Blue 17 group over on the right. We’d need to use smaller numbers here.

I placed the 1/6 domino from Blue = into Orange 6, the 1/5 domino from Blue = into Purple >3 and the 3/3 domino in the Dark Blue = tiles, like so:

Step 3

Next, I placed the 6/6 domino in Blue 17 and the 5/5 domino from Blue 17 into Purple >4.

Solution

Now we can fill in the rest. The 0/2 domino slotted into Orange 2 and the 3/0 domino went from Orange 3 into the free tile. Next, I placed the 1/2 domino from Pink = in the center down into Green <5 and the 2/2 domino from Green <5 down into Blue <4. Finally, the 1/1 domino filled in the Pink = remaining tile and the final free tile. And that’s all folks!

This wasn’t a tough one to start, but it was pretty challenging after that, with so many conditions and small groups. Looking ahead and figuring out I’d need the larger pip dominoes in Blue 17 was the key to solving this one. How did you do?

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