Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Sunday, August 31st
Welcome back, Pipsqueaks! That’s my term of endearment for all you Pips puzzlers out there—myself included. It’s the last day of August and Pips has been one of this past month’s best little surprises. A fun diversion that’s a welcome change of pace from all the word puzzles I tackle every day. Today’s is a good little challenge. Let’s get to it!
Be sure to check out my weekend streaming guide for all the best new TV shows and movies out this week also. Lots of good stuff!
Looking for Saturday’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:
Pips example
Screenshot: Erik Kain
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
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
Medium
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
Difficult
I’ll walk you through my process for the difficult tier. Here’s what it looks like before getting started:
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
These are the 12 dominoes we have to work with:
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
With a puzzle like this, I try to hone in on the most difficult or specific condition first. Today, that’s the Pink = Groups. There are two: One requires 5 tiles and one 3. The first step is to find out which dominoes have the most pips in common. For today’s Pips, 4 is the most common with 6 total possibilities. No other number can fill this condition.
The other very specific condition on this board is the Orange 24 group. We know that this requires four tiles with 6 pips. So I placed the 4/0 domino in the Pink = group, with the 0 going down into the 0 Blue tile. Then I placed the 6/5 domino in the Orange 24 group with the 5 going into the Green 5 tile. Like so:
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
With this foundation to work with, we can start expanding our search. It’s not necessary to fill in a group all at once. You don’t always know which dominoes will go with which tiles just yet.
As far as I could tell, either 3’s or 1’s could fulfill the second Pink = group. However, it looked like we might need those 3’s to finish the Purple 13 group and the Dark Blue 4 group. We also have extra 1’s to work with. With this assumption in mind, I placed the 1/0 domino in the Pink = tile over into the Blue 0 group. Then I filled in the rest of the Orange 24 group with the 6/6 domino and the 6/4 domino. The latter filled in one of the Purple 13 tiles. As far as I could tell, this was the only way to fill in the Orange 24 group, but I was still guessing with the 1’s in the Pink = group.
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
With half the board filled in, I was feeling pretty solid about everything. Based on the dominoes I had left, I assumed that the Dark Blue 4 group would probably require a 3 and 1 rather than the 2/2 domino. That was mostly because of how I had to fit the 4’s into the bottom Pink = Group.
So I placed the 4/3 domino into Pink = jutting up into Dark Blue 4. I placed the 1/2 domino in Dark Blue 4 horizontally into Purple 13. Then I placed the 4/4 domino into Pink = and the 4/2 domino into Pink = spilling over into the open tile. Like so:
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
Up to this point, I was still a little worried that I may have messed up somewhere. But now I was confident that wasn’t the case. I had 6 out of 13 pips filled in on the Purple group, so I placed the 2/2 tile at the bottom (bringing me to 10/13) and the 3/3 tile at the top, spilling over into the open tile. That equaled 13 and finished up the puzzle!
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
This was a bit of a daunting Pips grid, with so many tiles all bunched together, but once again there weren’t a ton of different conditions to juggle. There were no < or > tiles or groups and no ≠ groups. This meant I was dealing entirely with totals or = and that definitely makes it a bit easier to solve. How did you do?
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