Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Sunday, April 26

The dog days of April are upon us, and by the end of this week we’ll be in May. School is wrapping up for students around the country. If you’re about to head into finals week, may the study gods be with you. If you’re about to be on summer break, hang in there. For now, grab your dominos and let’s solve today’s Pips!

Looking for Sunday’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 word “PIP” which is about as appropriate as you can get. If they’d used the word WORDLE we’d need a lot more dominoes! In any case, I just started with the first “P” and determined where the 3/4 domino could go. As you can see, there are several instances of 3 and 4 next to one another, but we only have one 3/4 domino. Looking at the rest of the tiles, it seemed clear that 3/4 would need to go from Purple 3 down to Green 4 (based on the Pink 10 we really didn’t have any options to go from Pink 10 down into a three-tile Purple =). So we’ll start there.

Step 1

Place the 3/4 domino from Purple 3 down into Green 4 and the 3/0 domino from Blue 3 into Purple =. The 0/0 domino fits into the remaining Purple = tiles and the 5/5 goes in Pink 10.

Step 2

Next, place the 6/6 domino in Pink > 10 (the 6/5 won’t work because we’ll need that 5 in a minute) and the 4/5 domino from Orange > 3 into Pink > 4. The 6/5 domino goes from Blue > 4 into Dark Blue 10 and the 5/1 domino goes from Dark Blue 10 into Green 3.

Solution

The 2/3 domino goes from Green 3 into Dark Blue 4 and the 1/3 domino goes from Dark Blue 4 into Orange 3. The 4/0 domino goes from Blue 4 into the one and only free tile and the 2/2 domino rounds things out back at the first “P” in the Purple = tiles.

Once again, I struggled more with the Medium Pips than the Hard Pips today, though the Hard Pips was a decent enough challenge. That’s fine. I love it when the Medium Pips is more challenging than usual, and I suppose it was fun that today’s Pips was the word PIP (or the word “did” upside down). How’d you do on today’s Pips?

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