‘Pips' Joins Wordle And Connections At The New York Times Games — Here's How It Works

Forbes

5 hours ago

There's a new game over at The New York Times. You can find it in the NYT Games App or at the newspaper's website, sitting next to Wordle and Letter Boxed and Strands and Connections.
It's a bit different from the rest of the NYT game offerings. It's not quite as visually-forward as a game like Tiles. But it's not a word game at all, so really nothing like Wordle or Connections or Strands or the Crossword.
In a way, it's a bit more like Sudoku, a game that requires you to place numbers in rows and boxes without repeating numbers in either space. There are Easy, Medium and Difficult tiers to solve each day.
In Pips, you have a grid of multicolored boxes. Each colored area represents a different 'condition' that you have to achieve. You have a 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 (the Difficult-tier Tuesday, August 19th puzzle):
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 can 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 'more than.' It varies by grid. Blank spaces can have anything.
How I tackled this Pips was pretty straightforward. First, I looked for the blank dominoes. I knew that the pink squares equalling 0 had to use these. Since there were only two, I knew those dominoes had to be in those squares, though I wasn't sure how to fit them just yet. Next, I looked for the most common 'pip' count. I knew I had to have 6 of the same count for the blue boxes. Only the dominoes with 1 pip had enough to fulfill that condition.
There was a domino with a 1 and a blank, so I put that in at the top left (the 1 in blue, the blank in pink). Then I put the domino with the blank and the 4 pips above it. Then I just filled in every blue square. The 1 and 3 clearly had to go where the green box was (3) and the 1 and 2 where the orange 2 was etc. The dominoes fell like, well, dominoes after that. Here's the filled-in grid:
It's pretty fun! I like that it requires you to think logically and creatively at the same time. It's not just a visual puzzle or just a math puzzle, but a bit of both. It's a nice change from my usual word puzzles also. You can play Pips right here.