NYT ‘Pips’ Hints & Answers For Friday, December 12

It’s Friday at long last and we have an Easy, Medium and Hard Pips to solve. Then we can settle in for the weekend (and all the other puzzle games we have lined up, no doubt). Let’s lay some dominoes!

Looking for Thursday’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. 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 “C” as in “C is for cookie, that’s good enough for me!” and “Count von Count, ah ah ah.” We have two (ah ah ah) clues to begin today’s Hard Pips. First, we know that Purple = has to be 2’s because we don’t have any other Pips with that many in our domino horde. That means that Pink = has to be 1’s, since we’ll need a double to make it work.

Step 1

We’ll begin with the 1/1 domino in the far-right tiles of Pink = and the 1/2 domino from Pink = over in the Purple = group. The 1/5 domino goes from Pink = into Blue 10, and the 5/0 domino goes from Blue 10 into the Green = group.

Step 2

The 0/2 domino goes from Green = over into Purple = and the 0/6 domino sticks up from Green = into the Blue ≠ group. Next, the 2/2 domino fills in the third and fourth tile of the Purple = group.

Solution

This next bit is where I got a little mixed up and had to do some rearranging, but it’s not so bad. The 4/6 domino goes from Blue ≠ into the only free tile. The 2/5 domino goes from Purple = into the Orange 5 tile and the 2/6 domino goes from Purple = into Pink ≠. That leaves us with the 4/0 domino from Dark Blue 4 into Pink ≠.

Definitely a tricky Hard Pips today, but not so tricky as some recent ones that really had me scratching my head and biting my nails. I think I had 0/4 from Green = into Blue ≠ and that had me stumped up in the top right with Pink ≠, but a little rearranging and we were groovy. Did you find any alternative solutions today?

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