Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Monday, September 8th

No joke, today’s Difficult Pips is the hardest I’ve encountered. It really took me awhile. I had to clear the board a couple times to figure it out. There were two particularly challenging things about this puzzle:

First, there are lots of different conditions on the board. Mostly these are single tiles, small Total groups and small = groups and even figuring out where to begin is tough.

Second, the shape of the puzzle. It’s basically a mushroom, and there are lots of little protrusions that make fitting pieces a little more difficult. I’ll walk you through it below. Let’s dive right in!

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

Let’s do a complete walkthrough of today’s Difficult Pips. It starts out like this:

Like I said above, even knowing where to begin is tricky in today’s Pips. After running over various conditions and placement, I came up with a few things I believed to be true:

• The Purple = Group had to be 2’s. There weren’t enough of anything else given some of the other conditions.
• The Dark Blue 16 group had to be all 4’s. There weren’t enough 5s and 6s to make that equal 16 any other way.
• With only 4 blank-side dominoes, this would be crucial in figuring out later steps.
• There was only one “6” domino and since there was a Blue 6 tile, I knew it had to go there.
• The Pink 3 tile had to go horizontal. If it went vertical, it would block off one of the tiles in the Dark Blue 3 group on the left side of the mushroom.
• The 6/2 domino had to go vertical. If it went horizontal, I’d have to use the 5/2 domino to fill in the top tile in the Purple = group, but I needed the 5/0 domino to go in the Pink 5 tile at the top of the mushroom.

This is how I started. I placed the 3/2 domino in Pink 3 / Purple = and the 6/2 domino in the Blue 6 / Purple = group, like so:

From here, I used the blank dominoes. I knew the 5/0 domino couldn’t go in stem of the mushroom. It had to go in the Pink 5 tile down into Orange 0. This meant the 0/2 domino had to go next to it, down into the Green 2 tile. The only other blank dominoes were a double, which meant they had to go in the Dark Blue 0 group at the very bottom. There was simply no other way these could be placed:

Since I knew that the Dark Blue 16 group had to be all fours and the Purple = group were twos, I was left with either 1s or 3s to fill in the Orange = group on the right. Given that I had to make the Dark Blue 3 on the left equal 3, I needed those 1 pip dominoes for that, so I operated under the assumption that the Orange = group was 3’s.

I placed the 4/3 domino from Dark Blue 16 into Orange = and finished off Orange = with the double 3. (We need to use doubles on both the left and the right side). I used the 2/2 domino to finish of the Purple = group at the top, like so:

So far, so good. At this point, I placed the 4/4 domino in the Dark Blue 16 group and the 4/1 domino in the Dark Blue 16 group going into the Green 3 group. This wrapped up the Dark Blue 16. I placed the 2/1 domino into Green 3 going into Dark Blue 3 and then finished that group off with the 1/1 domino, like so:

Thankfully, only two dominoes remained: The 1/3 domino, which I placed in Orange 1/Pink 3 and the 2/4 domino which I placed in Blue 2/Purple 4, finally finishing up this very, very challenging Pips!

Maybe it was just me, or maybe this really was the most challenging Pips we’ve had so far. Either way, it definitely gave my brain a workout! How did you do?

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