NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Friday, May 22

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:

10-7 = 3 is our Hard Pips today, and it is a pretty hard Hard Pips! The math might be simple, but figuring out where all these dominoes go is another matter entirely. We’ll start at the “3” which has a couple of Blue 3 tiles that make it pretty obvious where things go.

Step 1

Place the 3/6 domino from Blue 3 into Purple 10 and the 3/4 domino from the other Blue 3 into Purple 10 (in either location). Next, place the 4/5 domino from Green > 3 into the second Purple 10 and hop over the the = sign where you’ll place the 1/5 domino from Dark BLue 1 into Green > 4.

Step 2

Next, place the 2/4 domino in Green 6 and the 1/6 domino in Purple 7. The 1/1 domino goes in the bottom two Pink 2 tiles and the 0/2 goes from Pink 2 into Orange < 3.

Step 3

Place the 6/6 domino from Orange 9 up into Purple 8 and the 2/2 domino from Purple 8 over into Pink < 3. The 0/0 domino goes in the next two Dark Blue 0 tiles and the 0/3 goes from Dark Blue 0 into Orange 9.

Solution

Place the 5/6 domino in Blue > 10 and the 4/1 domino from Orange < 5 into Dark Blue 1. Next, place the 3/1 domino from Pink 3 into the first free tile and the 5/0 domino from Purple 10 into the second free tile. And that’s that!

Have a lovely Friday, Pipsqueaks!

How’d you do on today’s Pips?

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