NYT Pips Today: Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Tuesday, April 28

Tuesday’s Hard Pips might just be the most challenging Pips puzzle I’ve played. It’s so hard that I’m going to make this preamble very short so we can get right to the walkthrough. Grab your dominos, Pipsqueaks, and let’s get solving!

Looking for Monday’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:

Oof. This Hard Pips was so tricky I very nearly gave up! But there are clues if you look for them. Here’s what I observed:

Whenever there are two tiles with the same number adjacent, you have a pretty clear indication of what needs to go where, since there are no doubles in our domino stash. If you find this scenario next to an edge of the grid, you can pin down some early placements. Also, every 3 is accounted for with a tile, which means you have no spare 3’s to use in Blue 7. And since there are no 6’s, either, we know that Pink 9 must be a 5 and a 4 and Blue 7 must be a 5 and a 2. Even using a 2 in Blue 7 means we have one spare, so one of of our free tiles will be a 2. We also have one spare 0, which means the other free tile will be a 0. Let’s begin!

Step 1

Start with the 5/0 domino from Dark Blue 5 into Orange 0. We know this has to go here since we don’t have a 5/5 domino. The 5/4 domino goes next to that, from Green 5 into Dark Blue 4. Again, this has to go here because we have no more 5/0 domino to use. The 0/3 domino goes from Purple 0 into Green 3, and we know this because we have no 0/0 domino. Finally, the 0/2 domino goes from Pink 0 into Purple 2. This isn’t a “must go here” placement the same as the last three, but it’s where it goes.

Step 2

Next, place the 1/3 domino in the top left corner from Purple 1 to Pink 3. This has to go here since there’s a 1/3 below it as well, but placing this domino in the lower 1/3 would throw off our ability to make Pink 9 and we can’t come from the other direction because we have no 1/1 domino. Place the 3/4 domino from Blue 3 into Pink 9. The 4/0 domino goes in the top right corner and the 3/5 domino goes fro Green 3 down into Blue 7.

Step 3

Next, place the 4/1 domino from Orange 4 in the top center down into Dark Blue 1 and the 5/1 domino next to that, from Blue 5 into Orange 1. The 5/2 domino goes from Pink 9 over into Blue 7.

Solution

Hop to the bottom right corner and place the 2/1 from Pink 2 into Blue 1 and the 2/4 domino from Blue 2 into Orange 4. The 2/3 domino goes from the righthand free tile up into Purple 3 and the 0/1 domino goes from the lefthand free tile into Pink 1. And you’re done at last!

Realizing that all the 3’s had to go in the 3 tiles made all the difference for me here, because I could stop trying to make Blue 7 out of a 3/4 combo. Likewise, realizing that those bottom left dominos were pretty much locked in and couldn’t go anywhere else, gave me a reasonable starting place to build from. Still, this was an incredibly challenging Hard Pips and it took me a good long time to solve it.

How’d you do on today’s Pips?

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