Happy Saturday, Pipsqueaks! It's the first Saturday of April and we have three pretty challenging NYT Pips puzzles to solve before we to our weekend shenanigans. The Hard Pips is particularly unique today, but I thought that even the Easy was a bit more on the challenging side than usual. Grab some dominos and let's get down to business.
Looking for Friday'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.
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 rather daunting. It's also something of a trial and error puzzle, as there's no obvious starting point and lots and lots of the various two-tile groups could use more than one domino. This means that as you go along, you might try a domino in, say, the Pink 8 group that works, but then realize later it needs to be used elsewhere. Let's begin.
Step 1
Place the 5/4 domino in Purple 9 and the 4/2 domino from Pink 4 down into the first free tile. The 4/6 domino goes in Blue > 9 and the 6/3 domino goes in Orange 6 down into Dark Blue < 4.
Step 2
The 2/2 domino goes from Green 2 down into Orange < 3 and the 2/3 domino goes from Purple 2 down into Dark Blue < 4. The 1/2 domino goes in Pink < 4 and the 5/3 domino goes from Blue > 4 down into Green < 4.
Step 3
We had three doubles that could have gone in Purple = but we'll need the 5/5 here. The 4/4 has to go in Pink 8. The 0/5 domino goes in Blue 5 and the 5/6 domino goes in Orange > 4 down into Dark Blue > 4 (and can face either direction).
Solution
Finally, place the 0/3 domino from Green 0 down into Orange < 4 and the 1/6 domino from Purple 1 into the second free tile. The 3/4 domino goes in Pink 7 and the 5/2 domino finishes this puzzle off from Blue 5 down into Dark Blue < 3.
Like I said above, lots of trial and error with this one. Identifying the dominos that could work in Pink < 4 was important because there was only a couple, and this narrowed things down and made me rethink where I originally had both the 1/2 and 1/6 dominos. A nice little challenge today!
How'd you do on today's Pips? Let me know!
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