NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Saturday, May 16

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. 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.

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

Today’s Medium Pips

Hard Pips Walkthrough And Solution

Here’s today’s Hard Pips:

Today’s Hard Pips is unique for one reason: Each domino you place in today’s puzzle is going to be vertical. It is a directionally constrained Pips by design, and this presents some unique challenges. It’s also more than a little challenging to figure out how to get every blank into Orange = and still have the right dominoes in Green ≠. Fortunately, we know a couple things right off the bat, like where our two dominoes with 1 pips go, and that 5/5 can only land in one spot thanks to the vertical-only rule. Let’s begin.

Step 1

We’ll start with the things we know to be true: 5/5 has to go from Blue 5 down into Dark Blue 5. 4/0 must go from Purple 4 up into Orange =. Same with 2/0 from Dark Blue 2 to Orange =. Where the 1’s go is a bit harder to say, since either could go on top or on bottom, but you’ll want to place the 1/4 domino from Purple 1 down into Pink 9 and the 1/6 domino from Green 1 up into Pink =.

Step 2

Next, place the 6/2 domino from Pink = up into Green < 3 and the 0/3 domino from Orange = up into Green ≠. The 0/0 domino goes in the next two Orange = tiles (vertically) and the 4/2 domino goes from Purple 4 down into Pink < 3. the 5/0 domino goes from Pink 9 down into Dark Blue < 2.

Solution

Place the 3/6 domino from Blue 3 at the bottom up into the first free tile. The 0/6 domino goes above that from Orange = into Green ≠ and the 4/3 domino goes from Green ≠ up into Orange 3. Place the 5/2 in the remaining Green ≠ slots and the 2/3 domino from Blue 2 down into the second and final free tile.

I really struggled with today’s Hard Pips, often getting to what I thought was the end only to come up short of blanks or have too many of the same Pips in Green ≠. With some rearranging, however, I finally got there.

How’d you do on today’s Pips?

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