Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Tuesday, September 16th

The days keep falling like dominoes. We’re now officially past the halfway mark in September and my kids are already talking about Halloween. I’m not sure if I want 2025 to slow down or speed up. It’s crazy out there, folks. 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:

Lately every Hard Pips has been some kind of fun shape, like kangaroos and dogs and little houses. Today it’s just a . . . blocky thing. This was a somewhat challenging puzzle to begin, but overall much easier than some recent Pips. The trick is mostly in the counting.

Step 1

First off, we know we need to Equals groups. Blue has 5 tiles that all must be the same and Purple has three. We know for sure that 2’s have to be in the Blue = group since only 2’s have enough to fill those tiles.

We also know that the Pink 4 group has four tiles, which means the numbers in each tile must be quite low. The Purple = group can’t be low numbers because of this so it has to be 5’s or 6’s. But we can rule out 5’s since we need to make the Orange 10 group work, and while we could combine a 6 and a 4 to do that, we wouldn’t have the right pips leftover for Pink 4 and Blue =. So we can safely assume that the 5’s will be used for the 10 Orange group.

I began in the bottom right corner, placing the 2/4 domino from Blue = into Dark Blue ≠. Then I placed the 2/5 From Blue = into Orange 10 and the 5/5 domino from Orange 10 into the free tile. Finally, I placed the 2/1 domino at the bottom of Pink 4, since I knew I’d need all the 6 dominos up above in Purple =.

Step 2

Next, I placed the 6/1 domino from Purple = into Pink 4 and did the same with the 6/2 domino. I now had a total of four pips in Pink 4, so I placed the 2/0 in the Blue = into Pink 4, like so:

This left me with a pretty easy finish. The 2/3 domino wrapped up the Blue = group, with the 3 going into the free tile and the 6/3 domino wrapped up the Purple = group with the 3 going into the remaining free tile. And that’s all, folks!

Solution

Like I said, easier than some recent Pips, but challenging enough that I had to really think about where to begin and how to lay things out so that I’d have the right dominoes going in the right direction. How did you do?

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