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 duck’s head to me. The beak on the left. The eye in the one space at the top. The trick with today’s Hard Pips is getting rid of high-Pip dominos, since we need our 0’s and 1’s for all the 0 tiles and the Blue < 5 group. We have several doubles, but I like the 5’s for Blue = because 4’s might be needed in the 8 groups. At least one of those 6’s probably needs to get dumped into a free tile. Let’s begin!

Step 1

Start with the 3/0 domino from Purple 3 into Pink 0 and the 0/4 tile from Pink 0 down into Orange =. The 5/5 domino goes in the top left tiles of Blue = and the 5/4 domino cuts across from Blue = into Orange =.

Step 2

Place the 5/2 domino from Blue = down into Pink = and the 6/3 domino from the first free tile over into the second Purple 3 tile. Hop down to the bottom of the grid and place the 6/1 domino from Dark Blue 8 into Blue < 5 and the 2/1 domino directly below that. Finally, plop that 5/3 domino into Purple 8 — I guess we didn’t need 4’s for our 8 groups, after all.

Solution

Place the 4/4 domino in Green =, the 0/0 domino in Orange 0 and the 1/1 domino in the remaining two tiles of Blue < 5. That’s all our doubles! Next, place the 1/0 domino from Dark Blue > 0 into Green 0 and the 4/2 domino from the second free tile into Pink 2.

Once again, this Hard Pips looked harder than it ended up being. I only got a little thrown off at the bottom right, trying to place the 4/4 domino in the Purple 8 first and then realizing the 5/3 would fit there, freeing up 4/4 for Green =.

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

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