NYT Pips tips, walkthrough and solutions for Tuesday, November 4

Are your dominoes not lined up properly? Are the colorful tiles in the latest NYT game, Pips, too dazzling? Or maybe you just want to compare notes. Anyway, I have the solutions for the Easy and Medium Pips puzzles below, and a full walkthrough of the Hard Pips. It’s another beautiful November day, but it’s certainly cooling down. The leaves are falling. Time to heat up that apple cider and solve today’s Pips!

Looking for Monday‘s Beep? Read our guide here.

How do you play Pips?

In Pips you have a grid of multicolored boxes. Each colored area represents a different “condition” you must achieve. You have a select number of dominoes that you must spend completing the grid. You must use every domino and meet all the conditions to win. There are easy, medium and difficult levels.

Here is an example of a difficult level Pips:

As you can see, the grid has a number of symbols and numbers associated with each color. On the far left, the three purple squares may not be equal to each other (hence the equal sign crossed out). The two pink squares next to them must total 0. The zigzagging blue squares must all be equal to each other. You click on dominoes to rotate them, and that’s necessary because they need to be rotated to fit where they belong.

Other conditions, such as ‘less than’ or ‘greater than’, will not appear in this grid. If there are multiple tiles with > or < signs, the total of those tiles must be greater or less than the stated number. It varies per grid. Empty spaces can be anything. The different possible conditions are:

• = All kernels in this group must be equal to each other.
• ≠ In this group, not all kernels may be the same.
• > The pip in this tile (or tiles) must be greater than the stated number.
• < The pip in this tile must be smaller than the stated number.
• An exact number (such as 6) The pip must be equal to this exact number.
• Tiles without conditions can be anything.

To win you need to complete all your dominoes by filling in all the boxes and making sure you meet all the conditions. Sometimes there is only one way to solve the puzzle. Other times there may be two or more different solutions. Play today’s Pips puzzle here.

The current Pips solutions and walkthrough

Below are the solutions for the Easy and Medium tier Pips. Then I will guide you through the difficult puzzle. Spoilers ahead.

Today’s easy kernels

Today’s medium burners

Hard Pips walkthrough and solution

Here are today’s hard pips:

Every new Hard Pips is a new Rorschach test as far as I’m concerned, and I see a dinosaur in this. Just a baby dinosaur. What a sweetheart.

We have three free tiles to work with here, plus two large groups. We also know that every empty tile we have must be used in the Pink 0 group. That’s a pretty good place to start.

Step 1

Start with the 4/0 domino from the free tile up to Pink 0. The 2/0 domino goes in the Purple <3 tile to Pink 0 and the double empty domino will fill the remaining Pink 0 tiles.

Step 2

At first I tried 6’s in the Blue = group, but this didn’t work. So I cleared those and tried 5’s, the only other Pips we have enough of for a group of five tiles. Place the 4/5 domino on the free tile in Blue =. Then the 5/5 domino is placed vertically to the right of it. The 5/1 domino goes from Blue = to Orange 2 and the 5/3 domino goes up from Blue = to Purple 3.

Then place the 3/1 domino from Purple 3 in the second Orange 2 group and the 3/4 domino from Purple 3 in Pink 8.

Solution

We are on our way home now! The 1/4 domino fits from the top Orange 2 into Pink 8. Place the 2/6 domino from the Dark Blue 2 tile into Green = and place the 6/6 domino horizontally directly below it.

The 1/6 domino fills the last Orange 2 tile in Green = and we wrap it together with the 6/4 domino from Green = in the last free tile slot. Please note that all free tiles are filled with 4’s.

This wasn’t actually that challenging, with some clear directions on where to start thanks to the limited number of blank dominoes. The only confusing part was figuring out whether 5’s or 6’s went into each of the Blue and Green = groups, but the limitations of what would work in Purple = helped.

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