Nonogram apps


Nonogram.com

Nonogram Katana


Two Eyes Nonogram
 

I actually never heard of "nonogram" puzzles until I ran into the Nonogram Adventure app in the Android Play store about six months ago.  The idea is to mark the boxes on the grid using the numbers around the edges.  Quite addictive, really.  So, after being a kid who played every little strategy puzzle I could find, and managing to go my whole life without falling into sudoku, I found myself hooked on this instead.  Sure.

After working through a few hundred of those puzzles, I found other Nonogram apps, each with its own pros and cons.  

Nonogram.com: a good basic apps, puzzles up to 15x15, black and white only.  They have a daily challenge, and about twice a month they put up a series of about 40-100 puzzles with two to seven days to score a trophy of some kind for solving them all.  You get three tries per puzzle, after which you have to "Buy More Lives" but they don't cost anything.

Nonogram Katana: way more attractive and with better game controls, this one has puzzles up to 25x25.  Oh, who am I kidding, they go up to 85x85 (which is just insane) and can be in full color.  Check out their site below for some actual screen shots.  Those huge puzzles looks like full scale needlepoint tapestries.  Those render unusably tiny on the phone or tablet but are good for a PC.  And they have a library of over 20,000 patterns submitted by users.  No limit on how many wrong moves you make.  It just highlights columns or rows in red if they are no longer solvable.

Two Eyes Nonogram is just gorgeous.  It's hard to be impressed by game art these days, but this one has such a rich and solid set of animal/nature graphics, it is a visual treat.  It has games up to 20x20, but mixes it up by having visual puzzles that are constructed from up to 6x6 sets of individual patterns, and by being basic black and white but colorizing the individual boxes so you get unexpected splashes of color as you work your way through, which makes it easier to identify the shape you are working on.  Here, you get nine lives per puzzle, but I have never had to use more than two.

I would say that Two Eyes is the most relaxing experience by far, but Katana has the huuuuuuge library of puzzles and appears to know no bounds when it comes to the detail and work put into them.  I even added one pattern myself (a 15x15 outline of Florida) with more planned.

All the apps start to have issues with large puzzles.  15x15 looks like the practical limit for smaller devices, and you can often mark boxes by mistake while trying to zoom or scroll larger puzzles.  But I have been enjoying them immensely; they are good for a few minutes of puzzling at the end of the day.

Links:
Two Eyes Nonogram (App link)

I'm sure there are many more of these apps out there.  I will try to come back in a later post with another batch to look at.


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