How To Solve Today’s NYT Pips Puzzles, Thursday August 27

Today's Pips

Credit: NYT

Looking for help with today’s NYT Pips puzzles? You’ve come to the right place. Not only will you find strategies below, but full answers for each daily trio of Pips puzzles and a full walkthrough for the Hard Pips.

I hope you have your dominoes ready, oh my Pipsqueaks, because we’re diving right into this puzzle!

Looking for Wednesday’s Pips? Read our guide right here.

How To Play Pips

In Pips, you have a grid of multi=-colored 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:

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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:

I suppose the letter “L” is tucked inside all those colorful tiles. We have several doubles to utilize here: 3/3, 4/4, 5/5 and 6/6. 5’s and 3’s have by far the most of any pips on the board and either could work in Blue =. But the best starting point is down in the left corner where we have Green 0 — after all, we only have two blanks in our domino stash.

Step 1

Place the 0/2 domino from Green 0 up into Pink 6 and the 0/3 domino from Green 0 over into Purple 4. The 1/2 domino goes from Purple 4 into Pink 6 on the bottom right and the 4/5 domino goes from Pink 6 to Purple = on the left. The 5/5 domino finishes up that group and we still have a Dark Blue 5 that’s going to eat up another of our 5 pips. That means we can safely say Blue = will be 3’s. That also means we can save it for last.

Step 2

Move back to the bottom right corner and place the 4/2 domino from Pink 6 up into Dark Blue 8. The 6/5 domino goes above that from Orange = into Green= and the 6/6 domino goes from Dark Blue 8 into Orange =. Place the 6/1 domino from Orange = into Purple = and then hop back up to the Pink = pair at the top and stick the 4/4 domino there. We know it goes there since the only other double we have is 3/3 and that belongs in Blue =.

Solution

Stick the 3/6 domino from the top Blue = tile into Orange 7 and the 1/5 domino from Orange 7 down into Green =. The 5/3 domino goes from Dark Blue 5 into Blue = and the 1/3 domino goes from Purple = into Blue =. That leaves us with the 3/3 domino to fill in the remaining Blue = tiles and we’re done! Huzzah!

Have a thirsty Thursday, Pipsqueaks!

How’d you do on today’s Pips?

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