Topic: Gaming Nonograms

Late · 2026-01-01T16:34:20+00:00

Hello and welcome to gaming nonograms, a place for likeminded puzzle enthusiasts. I happen to have a catalog of gaming themed nonograms that I have designed over the years but which have largely just been sitting on my computer with no one to solve them. I thought I'd finally fix that and turn them into a forum game. I know there are bunch of people here who like Jupiter's Picross series as well as other nonogram games like Murder By Numbers and Piczle Cross but feel free to join in even if you are a complete beginner. I should have perhaps prepared a tutorial in advance for such people. I'll add one later if needed. The internet is your friend in the meantime. The planned schedule is new puzzle(s) every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Puzzles will become larger and more difficult over time. Saturday's puzzle will generally be slightly harder than the ones on weekdays. The resulting image often depicts a character that can be found in a game that is available on Nintendo consoles but there are some outliers. Puzzle images are fill tool friendly, consisting only of flat colors, so you can simply copy and paste the image in a program like Paint and solve it using one color for filling and another for crossing. Alternatively, you can either print or copy the puzzle on paper by hand. Once you have solved a puzzle, you may give an answer as to what the resulting image is. Please, use spoiler tags in order to avoid spoiling the solution to others. Your answer acts as feedback so I know if the image is recognizable or not. Feel free to give additional feedback regarding difficulty and such. I can also keep score if people feel competitive. I will provide the solution to previous puzzle whenever I post the next puzzle. This will also be in spoiler tags. To use spoiler tags, you simply write (spoiler)message here(/spoiler) but replace ( ) with [ ], like this [spoiler]example[/spoiler]. If you are still unsure, you can quote any message with spoiler tags and it will show you how the message was formatted. To get things started, here are the first two puzzles. Have fun! EDIT: Here's the tutorial that should have been here from the get-go: My terminology may differ from ones used elsewhere. And while the mechanics are quite simple, it is a bit awkward to try to convey in text form. Hopefully the accompanying images help. In order to solve nonograms, you will need to fill and cross cells according to the hints around the grid. Filled cells form an image while crosses are there to help you keep track of cells that cannot be filled. Each number indicates how many consecutive cells need to be filled. There has to be at least one empty cell between each consecutive block. Filled blocks follow the order of hints: Leftmost hint corresponds to leftmost block, topmost hint corresponds to topmost block. Standard puzzles have a width and height that is divisible by 5 and consist of smaller 5x5 subgrids so that it's easier to keep track of things when puzzles get larger. Let's take a look at some samples. Here we have some simple isolated rows from a 5x5 puzzle. 1: The hint is 5. We can fill every cell. 2: The hint is 0. We can cross every cell. 3: There are three sets of 1. There is only one possible solution. Most of the time there's not enough info to fill an entire row. The hint is 3. There are 3 possible positions but the middle cell is always filled. Here's a similar situation for 1 2. There are two possibilities, one of the cells for the second hint overlap so we can fill it. This time we have a row with 10 cells. 4 and 3 has many possible positions. Luckily, we can simplify things a bit. We are only interested in the extremes. What would it look like if we start from the leftmost cell and put everything as tightly as possible (one empty cell between hints)? What about when we start from the right? These two alone show us that we can fill a total of 3 cells. 2 for the first hint (4) and 1 for the second hint (3). All the other possible variations will also have these cells overlap by default. You can write them out if you want to check for yourself. Filling cells using this technique is what you will be doing the most when solving puzzles. Be wary, the overlapping section needs to be for the same hint. In this case, we cannot fill any cells with the information we currently have because even though there appears to be an overlap, it's not for the same hint. There are a total of 6 different possibilities for this pattern. Here we have a row where one of the cells has been crossed already due to a vertical hint. The 2 can't fit on the left side so we can cross the leftmost cell. You can then apply what we've learned so far to fill the middle cell. There are other techniques that I could teach but I think it's more interesting to figure things out yourself. The number of hints that help you at the beginning is limited but whenever you fill or cross a cell in a row, it will also affect a column and vice-versa. Crisscross from one hint to another and you will arrive at the solution. It's time to try a puzzle!

Posts 81 to 100 of 122

81
CobaltFan
Thu 12th Mar 2026

I think it has to do with the resolution of the nonograms being the right size, but when I go to print them out, I don't have to do any finicking with the size. I have to do that with most things I print, but not with these nonograms. It's such a small thing, but I really appreciate it.

Warning: Spicy opinions like "M&Ms are overrated." may leak from this unit!

82
Late
Thu 12th Mar 2026

@CobaltFan That's good to hear. I haven't tried printing them myself (I'm out of ink and don't have use for my printer otherwise) but it certainly was my intention to make them printer friendly. The images are pixel perfect. I scale them by 2 using nearest-neighbor method before uploading so that they fit better and are slightly easier to work with. I also make sure to link to the original instead of the compressed thumbnail sized image that the hosting website creates.

Check out my Gaming Nonograms thread here on Nintendo Life if you are into Picross or other similar games.