By Erik Kain,Senior Contributor
Copyright forbes
Today’s Pips
Credit: NYT
It’s Thursday and I am incredibly sore and tired after really hitting the weights and the yoga mat hard this week. Sore is good! It takes pain to reduce pain, or at least that’s my experience with exercise. We must exercise our minds as well, and what better way to do that than with a fun puzzle game about placing dominoes in the correct tiles. Come along, my Pipsqueaks, let’s solve today’s Pips!
Looking for Wednesday’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:
Pips example
Screenshot: Erik Kain
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 The pip in this tile (or tiles) must be greater than the listed number.
4 group, so we can assume that one of the 10 groups will require a 6 and a 4.
I started things off placing the 5/1 domino in Pink >4 into Purple 2 and the 2/1 domino from Blue = into Purple 2.
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
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I wanted to fill in the entire row of Blue = so I placed the 2/4 domino from Blue = into Orange >3, the 2/5 domino from Blue = into Dark Blue 10, the 5/0 domino from Dark Blue 10 into Pink 0, and finally the 2/2 domino into the remaining two tiles of Blue =.
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
Most of the “L” is now complete. The only way to get the Green 2 group done now is with the 1/1 domino. We now have a Purple 10 and a Blue = group to finish up, along with two free tiles. I placed the 4/0 from Purple 10 into a free tile, the 6/3 domino from Purple 10 into the Blue = and the 5/3 domino from the final free tile into Blue =, and that’s a wrap!
Today’s Pips
Screenshot: Erik Kain
This only took me about twenty seconds longer than the Medium Pips today, which was harder than a normal Medium Pips, while this Hard puzzle was definitely on the easier side. How did you do?
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