Why make the pictures come alive?

A picture logic puzzle has a great moment at the end. You fill the last square and a shape you could not see five minutes ago is suddenly there. On paper that shape stays black and white, and that’s where it stops. We wanted the payoff to feel bigger.

So every picture in this game is drawn twice. The puzzle only knows which squares are filled. A second layer holds the real colors: the frog’s green, the ladybug’s spots, the white of an owl’s eyes. When you solve it, the numbers fade, the colors wash in, and the critter or plant starts to move. The frog blinks and hops. The tulip sways. Some squares that stay empty in the puzzle get a color too, like strawberry seeds, so the finished picture holds a small surprise. All 45 pictures here were drawn from scratch, one square at a time.

A bit of real nonogram history

These puzzles come from Japan. In 1987, Non Ishida, a graphics editor, won a design competition in Tokyo with pictures made by switching a skyscraper’s lights on or off. That grid of lit windows became the idea for a puzzle, and in 1988 Ishida published three of them in Japan as “Window Art Puzzles.”

At about the same time, Tetsuya Nishio, a professional puzzle maker, came up with the same kind of puzzle on his own and published it in a different magazine.

The puzzles reached Britain through James Dalgety, a puzzle collector. He named them nonograms, joining “Non” from Ishida’s name with the end of “diagram.” From 1990, The Sunday Telegraph printed one every week. Today they go by plenty of other names, including hanjie, griddlers and paint by numbers.

Three sizes

• Seed, 5×5: 15 small pictures, from a tulip to a frog face. A good place to learn how the numbers work.
• Sprout, 10×10: 15 pictures, including a robin, a bee and a watering can that tips to pour.
• Bloom, 15×15: 15 big pictures, including an owl, a garden gnome and a toadstool house.

Every puzzle can be solved one row or column at a time, with no guessing. We checked all 45 with a small program that solves them exactly that way.

How to play

• Each number beside a row, or above a column, is a run of filled squares. A row marked “3 1” has a run of three, then at least one gap, then a single square.
• Tap a square to fill it. Tap again to empty it.
• Drag along a row or column to fill several squares in one stroke.
• Mark squares you know are empty with ✕. Switch to Mark empty, long-press on a phone, or right-click with a mouse.
• A number turns pale once its run is done.
• Undo takes back your last stroke. Check shows any wrong squares, but costs a star.
• Fill every right square and the picture comes to life. Your pictures and stars save on this device.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.
• Earn 3 stickers in this game for your QuickBOP sticker book.

Tips

Start with the big numbers. In a row of 10, a run of 8 covers the middle 6 squares wherever it sits. Fill those first and the columns start to talk.

Add it up. The runs plus one gap between each pair tell you how much room is left. In a row of 5, “2 2” needs 2 + 1 + 2 = 5 squares, so there is only one way to place it.

Mark the empties. An ✕ is just as useful as a filled square. Once a row is done, cross off the rest so the columns get easier.

Check when you’re stuck. You get three stars per picture. Each check costs one, but you never drop below one star, so there’s no harm in asking.

Your turn

Fifteen little seed pictures are waiting at the top of this page. Fill your first square and see what wakes up.