History
In the 1980s, Non Ishida looked around Tokyo's skyscrapers and imagined each of their windows as individual pixels. She won a competition for her idea to create images by lighting up city windows and subsequently modified it for paper, creating "window art puzzles." Non's "window art puzzles" eventually caught the eye of James Dalgety, an English puzzle collector, who helped introduce them to the world as "nonograms." His term for the creation is a mashup of Non's name and the English suffix, -gram, meaning visual representation.
Nonograms can also be found by the names "picross," "griddlers," "pic-a-pix," "paint by numbers," and "Hanjie."
My connection
To me, nonograms itch the same part of my brain as sudoku. One must be meticulous when solving both gridded puzzles, but the resulting image of nonograms is much more satisfying to me than a jumble of numbers.
I was introduced to nonograms as a pre-teen when a friend gifted me a physical book of them. I was immediately hooked. In college, they reentered my life through free puzzle apps, but I never found them to be as fun as the more detailed pen-and-paper versions.
I wrote my first nonogram in 2023 and they are now one of my favorites to produce!
Start to solve
Nonograms appear as a rectangular grid with numbers along two adjacent edges. The cells in these grids are binary pixels-- they will either be filled or unfilled.
Filled cell on the left; unfilled on the right. Unfilled cells may also be represented with an "X" in the center.
The numbers along the side of the grids are your clues and they tell you how many cells are consecutively filled in within a given row or column.
For example, you may be given the clue that nine out of ten cells are filled. Count from the far right and left sides of the row to visualize the potential answers.
When multiple clues are present, their order indicates the placement of the groups of filled cells. There must be at least one unfilled cell between each group of filled cells.
With a full grid, you must work back and forth between the rows and columns to determine which cells you must logically fill in. When you are sure a cell cannot be filled, put a dot or "x" in it.
Ready for more?
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Can't wait? Try out one of our books!
Encrypted Cryptids (100% of the puzzle pages include a nonogram)
Ohio Engimas (25%)
Cleveland Conundrums (17%)