Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Monday, September 1st

Happy Labor Day everyone! I hope you have the day off, and if you don’t then I hope your work is satisfying and meaningful, or at the very least you have a good (or tolerable) day. Whatever you’re up to, we have a Pips to solve. Let’s get it done!

Looking for Sunday’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

I’ll walk you through my process for the difficult tier. Here’s what it looks like before getting started:

Just 8 dominoes today, making this one of the smaller Difficult tier Pips we’ve seen so far. This one is shaped roughly like a domino or, if you take out the open tiles, the number 2.

Even more interesting, this Pips only has = groups and nothing else, and every group must equal 8 or 0. This was a somewhat confounding twist, and I had a false start trying to work my way up from the bottom. I backed up and took another crack at it, this time from the middle. I figured I knew that the blank dominoes all had to go vertically into the 0 groups, which meant none of them could be in those middle rows.

Every “8” group had to include two non-blank squares, and each had to somehow equal 8 (obviously) which was a bit of a trick, but did mean we could limit our central tiles to dominoes with no blanks, which were half our total supply. I put the 5/6 domino into Dark Blue/Green, the 4/3 domino into Orange/Dark Blue and the 2/5 domino into Green/Blue, like so:

I wasn’t 100% sure this would work, but I now had 3 out of 4 of the dominoes without blanks accounted for, and this struck me as a good thing. It meant I still had all the dominoes I needed for the 0 groups. Next, I placed the 4/6 domino into Orange/Purple, leaving me with only the blank-half dominoes. I placed the first one into the Blue/Pink tiles at the top, which finished my second-to-last 8 group, and the 1/blank domino into the bottom right, like so:

I had only two dominoes remaining at this point. I popped the 2/blank into the bottom left tiles and the 4/blank into the top left and that was that. Here’s the final puzzle:

This was definitely easier than the last couple Pips we’ve solved, but at the same time a little harder to know where to start. There weren’t any groups with five or six that had to equal one another, and none of the single tiles were obviously meant to be one domino or another. But once you get going, this one finishes up quickly. How did you do?

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