What’s a nonogram?
Well it’s a type of math structure, which has been for some reason of late been labelled as a game distributed under the general label of picross, where you’re presented with a grid where each row and column has numbers in it expressing how many of those squares are filled in and in what kind of sequence and you get something that looks a little bit like a crossword someone forgot to finish making.
There’s a lot of fun stuff in Picross structures that builds around mathematical principles and grids and boundaries and ranges and the good news is that if you play Picross a bit you’ll start to see ways that these things create inferred information that you may have thought was impossible.
Wait, hang on, someone paid to be funny did a video explaining it, here, go see what he has to say:
I’m not going to try to explain how to play Picross? Because I don’t really know how I learned how to do it beyond having it underscored to me that Picross is fundamentally fair and that if you have to guess, that’s a failure of the design, that everything else is literally just a matter of building techniques and processes that always work.
The thing is, this isn’t really a game to recommend as much as it is a genre of games that I am now imparting to you which you can play on almost every platform and with varying degrees of accomplishment or framing that makes it feel good for you to play. In my case, the Picross I play of choice is this website, because the puzzles it generates are effectively meaningless. This isn’t a perfect site – it seems to me after a lot of play that there are some puzzles that it generates that may have a unique solution but that the final steps of that solution may involve guessing between one of two final options. That’s non ideal, but it also takes literally no time to roll up a new puzzle the second you make a mistake, which I do.
Picross is a nice no-impact game to spend your time on, and there are so many different Picross games out there it’s kind of a game itself to find the one or two Picrosses that work best for you. I really liked finding out about Picross this year and it’s a lot faster than booting up The Swindle when my brain worms start to eat me.
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