NYT ‘Pips’ Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Friday, May 15

Another Friday, another Pips puzzle to solve. Well, another three Pips puzzles to solve. The Easy and Medium aren’t too bad today, but I definitely had a trickier time with the Hard Pips. Grab some dominoes and let’s go solve these!

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:

The only thing we know for sure looking at today’s Hard Pips is that 1’s will make up the big Orange = group in the center. Then the question becomes, what else can feed into that group from the perimeter? We’ll start at the bottom right today with a pair of doubles.

Step 1

Place the 6/6 domino from Purple 6 into Pink 9 and the 3/3 domino directly below that from Green 6 into Pink 9. Next, place the 3/1 domino from Green 6 into Orange = and the 4/5 domino above that, from Green 4 into Dark Blue 10.

Step 2

Place the 5/3 domino from Purple 10 into Pink 5 in the top left corner, then place the 5/6 domino from Purple 10 down into Blue 12. The 2/1 domino goes next to that, from Pink 5 down into Orange = and the 5/1 domino goes from Dark Blue 10 down into Orange =.

Solution

Next, place the 4/4 domino in the left two tiles of Dark Blue = and the 1/1 domino directly above that in Orange =. The 4/6 domino goes from Dark Blue = into Blue 12 and the 0/1 domino goes from Blue 12 into the last remaining Orange = tile. And that’s a wrap!

I think I struggled the most with making Blue 12 come together. I had everything right but tried to make the top left work with 6’s and 4’s, quickly learning that I needed those 4’s for Dark Blue = instead. It came together in the end!

How’d you do on today’s Pips?

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