NYT Pips Today: Hints, Answers And Full Solution For Monday, January 12

Pips, Pips and more Pips. They come in Easy, Medium and Hard flavors. They’re guaranteed to make you think and strategize. It’s my favorite of the NYT Games App games, though I don’t think it’s ever become as popular as Wordle or Connections or Strands despite its colorful arrays of tiles and all the lovely dominos. Oh well. Let’s solve today’s!

Looking for Monday’s Pip? Read our guide right here.

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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. 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.

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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

Easy Pips

Screenshot: Erik Kain

Today’s Medium Pips

Medium Pips

Screenshot: Erik Kain

Hard Pips Walkthrough And Solution

Here’s today’s Hard Pips:

Hard Pips

Screenshot: Erik Kain

This is a weird Hard Pips, broken into three pieces with no real rhyme nor reason and no super clear place to start. We have several doubles, and just two numbers that can work in the bottom chunk of four tiles. This is because we need a double to fill the left two tiles of Blue = and we need that to match up with a domino that has one half > 4 for the Orange tile. This means it could be 1’s in Blue = with a 6 in Orange 4, and then 3’s up in Pink =. But I tried that, and it didn’t work. Here’s what to do instead.

Step 1

Place the 4/6 domino from Purple 4 into Green 11 and the 2/5 domino above that from Orange 4 into Green 11. The 2/0 domino goes from Orange 4 up into the Purple 0 tile and the 6/1 domino goes directly next to that from Dark Blue 6 into Pink =.

Hard Pips

Screenshot: Erik Kain

Step 2

Since we’ve committed to 1’s in Pink = we may as well fill in the other chunks. Place the 5/3 domino from Orange > 4 into Blue = and finish Blue = with the 1/1 domino. Only three dominoes fit into Pink 7 and since we’ve used the 2/5 and the 6/1, go ahead and place the 4/3 there.

Place the 0/1 domino from Green < 2 into Pink = and the 6/6 domino from Purple > 4 over into Blue 8.

Hard Pips

Screenshot: Erik Kain

Solution

The 1/1 domino goes directly above the 6/6, filling up two more tiles of Pink =. The 1/3 domino goes from Pink = into Blue = and the 3/0 domino goes from Blue = down into Orange 0. The 0/0 domino goes in the next two Orange 0 tiles and we’ll wrap things up with the 2/2 domino, which goes from Blue 8 into the single free tile.

Hard Pips

Screenshot: Erik Kain

All told, a fun challenge today, though not terribly difficult. How did you do?

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