Hints, Answers And Walkthrough For Wednesday, April 1

It’s Wednesday, April 1 and the internet is flooded with fake news. Don’t believe any of it on April Fool’s Day. Even the NYT Games people are in on the joke, but at least they’ve taken a soft touch. Today’s Pips is interesting because each puzzle — Easy, Medium and Hard — is a square comprised of 10 dominos worth of tiles. Stilll, despite that fact the Hard is nevertheless much more challenging. Let’s solve it!

Looking for Tuesday’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 looks just like the Easy and Medium and has the exact same number of dominoes. That’s both the joke and the lesson. You can make a Pips much, much harder without upping domino count or making elaborate shapes, simply by including tough conditions. We’ll start on the bottom right, because we know this has to be a 3/1 or a 3/0 from Pink 3 into Green < 2 simply because there’s a Purple > 3 above Pink 3 and not a single one of our domninos has 3/4 or higher.

Step 1

Place the 3/1 domino from Pink 3 down into Green < 2 and the 4/1 domino from Purple > 3 into Dark Blue =. The 1/5 domino goes from Dark Blue = up into Orange > 8 and the 4/2 domino goes from Orange > 8 into Blue < 6.

Step 2

Next, place the 3/3 domino from Blue < 6 into Pink > 2 and the 1/1 domino in the top two slots of Purple 8. The 6/4 domino goes from Purple 8 down into Green 7.

Solution

Place the 3/0 domino from Green 7 into Blue = and the 0/4 domino from Blue = into Orange > 3. Finish things off with the 0/0 in Dark Blu =.

Happy April 1 everyone! Be smart out there.

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

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