Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Saturday, September 6th

The weekend is here at last. It’s the first weekend of September and one of the last weekends of the summer, so make the most of it! It’s rainy and cool up in the mountains, which is music to my ears. Nights are downright chilly lately. I suppose I have mixed feelings. Autumn is making its presence known. Time marches on, and we are caught up in the stream, fallen leaves on a mighty current.

We may as well solve some puzzles along the way. Let’s knock out today’s Pips!

Looking for Friday’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:

It took me a minute to find the best starting point, and at first I placed the 1/3 domino into the Orange 1 group over into the Dark Blue 3 tile. I realized that this wouldn’t work due to the Blue 12 group above. So I popped the 0/3 domino there instead and placed the 1/6 domino directly above it, like so:

The second phase of this Pips was the trickiest. The combination was a bit confounding. I needed to fill two 4 tiles (Pink and Green) but also complete the Orange 15 and fulfill the Purple = condition. My first crack at this didn’t go how it needed to. I had the 6/4 domino going over from Blue 12 into Pink 4 and then filled in the Orange 15 group using a 5/2 domino into the Dark Blue 2 tile. This made it impossible to satisfy the Purple = group and Green 4 tile.

So I removed the dominos and tried a different approach. I put the 6/4 donino into Blue 12 up into Green 4. Then I put the 2/3 domino into the Dark Blue tile over into Purple = since I knew I needed those 3’s for the Purple = group. I used the 5/4 domino in Orange 15 / Pink 4 and finished the section off with the 5/5 domino in Orange 15, like so:

The hard part was now out of the way. I placed the remaining 3/6 and 3/1 dominoes into Purple = / Pink 11 and Purple = / Blue ≠. Then I put the 5/1 domino into Pink 11 / Blue ≠ and wrapped the puzzle up with the double blank in the open tile / Blue ≠. This is the final puzzle:

While this was far from the most challenging Pips we’ve seen, that central area definitely gave me a run for my money. How did you do?

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