Introduction To Nonogram Puzzles

What is Nonogram puzzle?

Nonogram, also known as Japanese crossword, is a graphic puzzle where you guess the whole picture by coloring cells or leaving them blank according to numbers on the left and on the top.

Example of a solved Nonogram:

Those numbers on the left and on the top represent how many cells should be colored. If there are 2 or more numbers, it means there must be one or more blank (not colored) spaces between those cells. For example, you can see there are 2 empty spaces between 2 colored cells and 1 colored cell in the last row in the example above.

How to solve Nonogram puzzles?

Let's solve a simple 5x5 Nonogram puzzle as an example.

Here's our Nonogram:

The first thing that I do is I find the biggest numbers and extract the number of the cells that should be colored (number on the left or number on the top) from the length of the row. The result is the number of cells that we'll leave blank from the left (or top) and from the right (or bottom) corners. It's hard to understand and write what I mean in text, so let's look at our Nonogram below.

In our example the biggest number is 3 (highlighted by blue circle) and the length of the row is 5. 5 - 3 = 2. So we leave 2 cells from the left and 2 cells from the right blank.

Why do we do that? Because we don't know where exactly all of those 3 colored cells would be located, but we know where only some of those will end up. The following picture illustrates this train of thought:

I think further visual explanations don't need my comments.

The previously described path is not the only way of solving Nonogram puzzles, of course. ;-)

Pics sources: all pictures in this post are created by me.

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