NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Answers, And Walkthrough For Saturday, December 6

Welcome to another glorious weekend, my dearest Pipsqueaks. We have three puzzles to solve and and a whole heap of dominoes to place, so let’s get right to it and solve today’s NYT Pips!

Looking for Friday’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.

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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’m so relieved that this isn’t another letter or number. We’ve moved into punctuation symbols, with a pair of question marks, which is what you’d put around a question if you were writing in Spanish. Por ejemplo: ¿Cómo resolvemos el rompecabezas de hoy?

Step 1

This is actually a very, very tricky Pips — or at least it challenged me. I had to rearrange many times before I finally got it to stick. Today, we’ll start with the right ? and place the 2/1 domino from Orange 2 into Purple 1. We have just two “2” pips, so we know we need one of them in Orange 2. The question is whether we’ll need one in Purple 2, or if we can make that with two 1’s.

Fortunately, we have three 1’s and five 4’s (which we’ll need in Orange =) so place the 1/4 domino from Purple 1 into Pink 10. Place the 6/6 domino from Pink 10 into Dark Blue 8 and stick the 2/1 domino from Dark Blue 8 over into Purple 2. Use the 1/0 domino from Purple 2 down into the first free tile.

Step 2

Moving to the ¿, we’ll place the 5/4 domino from the free tile into Orange = and fill the next two Orange = tiles with the 4/4 double. The 4/0 goes from Orange = up into Blue = and the 0/3 domino slides from Blue = into Pink =. We’ll wrap this side up with the 3/5 domino from Pink = into Green > 1.

Solution

We have two dominoes for the two dots. The 6/0 will go from Blue > 1 into the free tile and the 0/0 double will go into Dark Blue < 2. At last, we’re done!

Did you struggle with this one as much as I did? Anybody come up with an alternative solution?

Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Be sure to follow me for all your daily puzzle-solving guides, TV show and movie reviews and more here on this blog!

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