It’s Friday, Pipsqueaks. The weekend is upon us—well, almost upon us. I’m tired from traveling and then all day Thursday dealing with car problems and traffic and just overall feeling a bit grouchy. To combat that, I’m going to get some really hard exercise in this fine fall Friday. When it comes to negative headspace, nothing quite fixes things for me like a workout. Of course, some fun NYT Games puzzles never hurt. Let’s solve today’s Pips!

Looking for Thursday’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:

Maybe this is a ship with a floating sail. Or a baby laying on its back throwing a rattle into the air. Let’s go with baby.

Step 1

This is definitely a tricky one when it comes to knowing where to start. The two big > groups give us some clues, however.

• Clue #1: Dark Blue >11 is exactly the same as a 12 total group, so we know two sixes need to go there.
• Clue #2: Purple >9 has to be at least 10, so either two 5 pips or a 5 and a 6 etc.
• Clue #3: We only have 3 6 pips available, and one of these has a 2 with it. Based on everything else, the only number I can see filling the big Blue = group is 2, so we’ll probably need that 6 over there.

With this in mind, I started out by laying the 6/5 domino from Dark Blue >11 into Green 7 and the 6/4 domino from Dark Blue >11 into the free tile.

Step 2

Next, I placed the 2/0 domino from Green 7 into Purple <1 (which is just Purple 0). The 0/1 domino slotted from Purple <1 into the free tile. Then I placed the 1/1 domino in Orange 3 and the 1/2 domino over into Blue =, like so:

Step 3

The 2/2 domino went right above the tile I just placed. Next, the 2/3 domino goes from Blue = into Orange =, the 4/3 domino goes from Pink <5 into Orange = and the 2/6 domino finishes up the Blue = group and the free tile. All we hav eleft is the baby’s rattle.

Solution

This last bit is easy enough. The 5/1 domino lays down from Purple >9 into Pink <3 and the 5/3 domino wraps things up by slotting into Purple >9 into the final free tile.

What made this one tricky was the sheer number of less than and greater than conditions. Some of these were deceptive, like >11 or <1 since that’s just 12 or 0, but those also made for pretty good clues. How did you do?

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