NYT Pips Today: Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Sunday, April 26

The last Sunday of April is upon us and before we can laze about and do nothing, we have to take all these dominos and figure out where they go. Today’s Easy Pips is easy, and today’s Hard Pips is on the easy side also, but the Medium Pips really had me stumped! I recommend that you try this for today’s Medium puzzle: Just realize that every single pip has to go in a colored tile. The free tiles have to be blanks. That should help. Read on for the solutions and a walkthrough for today’s Hard Pips.

Looking for Saturday’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 “L” as in “Larry” or “Lawrence of Arabia” or “Linguini.” It’s not entirely obvious where to begin, but only 6’s and 2’s could work in the big Blue = group at the center, and my gut told me 6’s. Of course, my gut also told me that 2’s would be in the Orange = group and that was totally wrong, but it was a quick fix.

Step 1

Start with the 6/3 domino from Blue = into Green 7 and the 4/0 domino above that, from Green 7 into Orange =. The 6/6 domino goes in the middle left Blue = tiles and the 6/0 goes from Blue = into Orange =. Place the 0/3 domino from Orange = up into Pink 4 and we’re done with Step 1.

Step 2

Place the 6/1 domino from Blue = up into Pink 4 and the 6/2 domino from Blue = into Purple =. The 2/2 domino goes in the next two Purple = tiles and the 2/1 domino goes down from Purple = into Dark Blue < 4. Finally, toss the 0/1 domino from Orange = down into Pink = in the bottom right corner.

Solution

Place the 1/5 domino from Pink = over into Blue = and the 5/2 domino from Blue = into the first free tile. The 2/4 domino goes into the Purple ≠ group and the 3/3 domino fills in the final two free tiles. A surprising use of a double!

I think I solved this about twice as fast as today’s Medium Pips, which really was a head-scratcher!

How’d you do on today’s Pips? Let me know!

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