Puzzle Royale
How to play Nonogram
Fill the grid to reveal a picture
Also known as Picross, Griddlers, Paint by Numbers.
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Reveal the picture
Match every row and column to its clues and the picture appears — that's how you solve it.
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Fill or cross out cells
Tap a cell to fill it in. Press and drag to fill a whole run in one stroke. Tap a filled cell again to mark it ✕ — a reminder that nothing goes there; tap once more to clear it. Prefer just filling? Turn ✕ marks off in Settings.
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Numbers are clues
Each number is a run of filled cells in that row or column, in order — the filled row here is that row’s 5, one unbroken run. A clue of “2 1” would mean two filled, a gap, then one.
Play Nonogram now
Solving tips
- Overlap counting: place a big clue at the far left, then the far right — any cells filled in both positions are certain (an 8-clue in a 10-wide row locks the middle six).
- Blanks are information too: crossing out cells that can’t be filled is as powerful as filling.
- Ping-pong between rows and columns — every cell you settle is a new clue for the line crossing it.
- Anchor off the edges: once a run touches the border, you can often complete it immediately.
- A finished line isn’t done until you X out the leftovers — those X’s unlock the crossing lines.
- Never guess: a proper nonogram always solves by pure logic. If you’re stuck, there’s a line you haven’t re-checked.
Where Nonogram comes from
- Born from skyscraper lights: in 1987, graphics editor Non Ishida won a Tokyo competition by designing pictures made of lit and unlit skyscraper windows — the idea became the nonogram.
- Invented twice at once: professional puzzler Tetsuya Nishio independently invented the same puzzle at nearly the same time and published it in a different magazine.
- The name "nonogram" was coined by British puzzle collector James Dalgety — "Non" from Non Ishida’s name plus "gram" from diagram.
- First appeared in English in The Sunday Telegraph, which ran Ishida’s puzzles weekly from 1990.
- Goes by many names worldwide: Picross, Hanjie, Griddlers, Paint by Numbers, Pic-a-Pix, and Oekaki Logic in Japan.
- Nintendo trademarked "Picross" (short for "picture crossword") and released Mario’s Picross for the Game Boy in 1995 — a hit in Japan, a flop in the US despite heavy advertising.
- Solving arbitrary nonograms is NP-complete — no known fast algorithm works for every grid, which is why big ones can feel so hard.
- In 1998 The Sunday Telegraph ran a reader competition to rename the puzzle — "Griddlers" won.
Play it against a hundred other solvers
Puzzle Royale wraps Nonogram and seven other logic puzzles in a battle
royale: a hundred solvers enter, four rounds, half the field goes out each time,
one champion. Or play it untimed in Practice with no stakes at all.
Try a Nonogram puzzle
The other seven