Today’s NYT Pips Hints And Solutions For Sunday, September 14th

Another day, another Pips puzzle for us to solve. It’s the second-to-last Sunday of summer, so make the most of it. Try to get outside and enjoy the world’s natural splendor. Breathe in those last few gusts of summer. And when that’s out of the way, we have a Pips to knock out.

Looking for Saturday’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:

Step 1

Today’s Hard Pips is clearly a kangaroo. You might see it differently, of course, but I see a kangaroo. The best place to start is the kangaroo’s tail. Because the Purple = group in the tail is three tiles in a row, we know that it has to begin with a double domino. We have four double dominoes: 0/0, 1/1, 2/2 and 3/3, but based on the Orange 10 group next to it, we’ll need something that has a 5 on one side, ruling out 1’s and 2’s. So the tail could be either 3’s or 0’s at this point. I had to look a bit further to make a judgment call. Basically, if you go with 0’s you can’t make the Orange 10 work with the Green 0 block above it, so I went with 3’s.

I slotted the 3/3 domino at the tip of the tail, then the 3/5 domino over into Orange 10. The next domino had to be a 5/0 so I placed that from Orange 10 up into Green 0. I wasn’t 100% certain of the next domino, but I felt fairly confident that the 0/4 should go from Green 0 into the Blue 4 tile. Finally, I placed the 0/0 double over in the kangaroo’s foot, and the 0/2 domino from the foot’s Blue 0 group up into Pink 2, like so:

Step 2

At this point, I simply filled in the remaining solo tiles. I placed the 1/5 from Purple 1 into Pink 11 (up in the kangaroo’s head), and the 1/0 domino from the other Purple 1 tile into the Orange 0 tile. Then I placed the 6/2 domino from Pink 12 into Green 3, like so:

Step 3

Everything was lining up quite nicely as this point, and I was pretty confident that I had everything in the right place. I placed the 1/1 domino into the Dark Blue 2 group, the 5/6 domino from Orange 8 up into Pink 12 and the 1/4 domino from Green 3 into Blue 9. Then I placed the 2/3 domino from Dark Blue = into Orange 8 and the 2/2 domino into the remaining Dark Blue = tiles. I’d filled in the body, arm, leg and tail and most of the head at this point:

To finish today’s Pips, I placed the 5/4 domino from Blue 9 into the free tile (the kangaroo’s neck) and the 6/4 domino from Pink 11 into the last free tile (the kangaroo’s ear). This is the final product:

This one bounced along nicely. It was a bit tricky to figure out what should go in the tail, requiring me to map out a couple of steps ahead before committing. Sometimes you just have to go with something and see how it plays out and possibly clear the board and start fresh, but today I was able to get a good handle on what I needed to start with just by checking possibilities a couple moves out. How did you do?

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