Nonograms: 100 Puzzles

A picture hidden in numbers.

The clues down the side and across the top tell you how many squares to fill and in what order. Work one line at a time, cross out what cannot be, and the picture comes up out of the grid. No arithmetic, no vocabulary, nothing to look up.

This book was built after reading what people say about the others

Faint grid lines. Squares too small to write in. Solutions that do not match their puzzles. Grids with more than one answer. Every one of those complaints is a specification here.

One puzzle per page

Never two to a sheet. Every grid is printed as large as an 8.5 by 11 page allows, and no square in this book is smaller than seven millimetres across. The gentlest puzzles have squares fifteen millimetres wide.

Grid lines you can actually see

Every line is ruled at twice the minimum weight Amazon publishes for printed tables, and every fifth line is heavier still, so you can count across a twenty-square row without losing your place.

A single solution, proven

Most of the nonograms you could generate at random have more than one answer. Finding that out is expensive: a solver can stop as soon as it finds one solution, but a validator has to prove there is no second. A separate program searches every puzzle in this book for a second solution. If it finds one, the puzzle does not go in.

Solved by logic, never by guessing

Every puzzle here falls to line-by-line reasoning alone. You will never reach a point where the only way forward is to try something and see what happens.

Difficulty measured, not estimated

Each puzzle carries a difficulty figure that counts how many sweeps of the grid a solver needs, how much is still blank after the first sweep, and how stubborn the worst line is. The hundred are printed in that order, gentlest first, from a ten by ten warm-up to a twenty by twenty finish.

What is inside

• 100 nonograms, from 10 x 10 to 20 x 20, one to a page.
• A worked example at the front, the same grid shown in four states with the reasoning that moves it along.
• A short guide to the four moves that finish any nonogram.
• Every solution at the back, printed large, with the name of the picture it makes.
• No solution is ever printed on the page facing its puzzle.

8.5 by 11 inches, 124 pages. Book 1 of Picture Logic.