NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Wednesday, May 20

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 looks like a mama elephant and her baby elephant. The baby is a ≠ group, but if you solve the mama elephant correctly, this should be easy enough. The best place to start is the Dark Blue 0 group, because we only have four blanks and we’ll need three right there.

Step 1

Place the 0/1 domino from Dark Blue 0 into Pink 2 and the 0/2 domino from Dark Blue 0 into Orange =. The 0/4 domino goes from Dark Blue 0 down into Purple = and the 1/6 domino goes from Orange 1 down into Green 12.

Step 2

Place the 2/2 domino in the next two Orange = tiles and the 2/3 domino up from Orange = into Blue 7. The 1/4 domino goes from Pink 2 into Blue 7.

Step 3

Place the 6/6 domino in Purple 12 and the 6/4 domino from Green 12 over into Purple =. The 5/5 domino goes below that in the left two Pink = tiles and the 5/4 domino goes up from Pink = into Purple =.

Solution

Place the 0/3 domino from Blue 0 into Green > 2 then place the 6/2, 3/4, and 5/1 dominoes into Dark Blue ≠ in whatever order you like. You’re done!

I tried starting on the left side of this Pips originally and kept getting a bit lost, so I cleared the board and focused on figuring out which blank dominoes made sense filling up Dark Blue 0 and that did the trick.

How’d you do on today’s Pips?

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