For Wednesday, April 22, Forbes published hints, answers and a walkthrough for NYT Pips, giving players a path through the day’s Hard puzzle. The solution matters because Pips gives three new puzzles each day, and the hardest tier can still trip up even careful players.
Pips is a logic puzzle built around dominoes, with Easy, Medium and Difficult tiers, and the goal is simple to state but hard to execute: use every domino and satisfy every condition across the colored board regions. Some of those conditions call for equal, not equal, less than or greater than, which turns a small board into a tight set of constraints.
The Hard Pips puzzle for April 22 is smaller than average, and it has only one double, which makes the layout more manageable once the sequence is clear. The right side in Purple = has to be 2s, so the 2/2 domino goes in the bottom two tiles of Purple =, then the 2/3 domino goes above that into Green > 2.
From there, the 5/3 domino goes from Orange > 2 into Blue =. The 3/0 domino then runs from Blue = up into Orange < 2, followed by the 0/6 domino from Orange < 2 over into Pink 6. The 6/4 domino goes from Pink 6 down into Dark Blue =, and the 4/3 domino stretches from Dark Blue = over into Pink > 2.
The last stretch closes the board cleanly. The 6/1 domino goes from Pink = into Purple =, the 1/0 domino goes from Purple = down into Blue =, and the 0/2 domino goes from Blue = into the one and only free tile. That path leaves no loose pieces, which is exactly what the puzzle demands.
The tension in a day like this is that the board looks open until the conditions start locking each domino into place. A player who misses the single double or misreads one colored region can lose the whole solve, even though the board is smaller than usual. For anyone checking the day’s solution, the answer path is already laid out; the harder question is whether the next Pips board will be this compact or much tighter.
