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 is brought to you by the letter “U” as in “Unbelievably easy” or “Ugh, I hate being sick.” It is a pretty easy one, though I had to make an educated guess about where to start. The thing to really notice here is that we have four free tiles and a bunch fo 6’s. Most of the groups are small numbers like 2 or 5 or < 2, so it’s safet to say that other than Purple 9, we need to use 6’s as our free tile dumps. We have two doubles, and while we can’t say for sure which goes in Green =, the fact that we have a Pink < 2 suggests strongly that we’ll need the 0/0 there.

Step 1

Start with the 3/3 domino in Green = and the 0/0 domino directly above that in Pink < 2. The 0/2 domino goes from Pink < 2 into Blue 5 and the 0/1 domino goes from Pink < 2 over into Purple 2.

Step 2

Place the 3/4 domino from Blue 5 down into Orange 5 and the 1/6 domino from Orange 5 down into Purple 9. The 3/6 domino goes from Purple 9 into the first free tile and the 6/2 domino goes from the second free tile into Blue 4.

Solution

Place the 2/4 domino from Blue 4 into Pink 8 and the 4/6 domino from Pink 8 into the third free tile. The 6/0 domino goes from the fourth free tile into Dark Blue 2 and wrap things up with the 2/1 domino from Dark Blue 2 into Purple 2.

The only change I had to make was I had initially placed the 1/2 domino from Pink < 2 into Blue 5 and that left me 1 short at Purple 2. A quick swap fixed things up, easy peasy, lemon squeezie.

How’d you do on today’s Pips? Let me know!

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