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Time to get addicted to something other than crack!

Picross or Nonograms are logic puzzles based on a grid in a similar way to Sudoku. The squares of the grid are either filled in or left blank and you decide which squares to fill in or leave blank by using the number clues provided for you. Once you have completed the puzzle, a basic picture will be the result of the filled in squares.

It doesn’t sound like much fun but then neither does Sudoku or even Tetris if you try to explain it. It is seriously addictive especially if like me you enjoy logic puzzles. Picross puzzles can always be solved using logic just like Sudoku and I think that is what makes them so satisfying.

There have been a few very good commercial Picross games, particularly those by Nintendo but since I mostly list free things here I am going to round up the best free Picross games or websites. I won’t explain the basic rules or how to play, you can find that on many of the websites listed below or Wikipedia.

If you are bored of Sudoku or have a few minutes to fill with something mind bending then try a few of these.

Picross.com & WiiPicross.com

Both these links point to the same well designed ‘Wii Themed’ Picross website. This has obviously been designed or redesigned with the Wii browser in mind with a very typical Wii colour scheme and design. I haven’t tested it on the Wii yet but you can see it will work well although once the puzzles get very large it may be difficult to point to the right cell in the grid using the Wiimote.

Regardless it is very usable on a PC, the user interface is very clean and simple. All you need is a mouse and the left button, one click fills the square, another marks it as empty whilst dragging with the button held down fills multiple squares.

There are apparently over 2000 puzzles to get stuck into, many submitted by the users and these appear to get added to regularly. They are also currently running an ‘Advent Puzzle of the Day’ and you can buy a book of Picross for children.

There doesn’t seem to be any saving of progress and puzzles are not marked completed so that’s probably my one disappointment with this website.

All in all a damn fine website for a bit of free puzzling.

Armor Picross & Armor Picross 2

Both of these are very good versions of the game from the well known Armor Studio website. Armor Picross 2 is the more polished effort as you would expect but if you run out of puzzles then it is worth heading to the original Armor Picross as it is still very playable.

Both have been created in Flash and as such have pretty rich user interfaces although the original feels rather cramped when compared to the new version. The newer version also has a nicer chilled out soundtrack whilst the first seems a bit lively for what is a supposed to be a relaxing pouzzle rather than a race against time. As far as I can tell they both save progress on your PC so finished puzzles are marked as completed and new packs get unlocked. With Armor Picross 2 there is also the option to download new packs although I haven’t got anywhere near needing any extra puzzles yet.

Armor Picross 2 is by far the best version I have found for free online, and pretty close to my favourite version on the Nintendo DS.

TylerK’s Picross

This one has been around for a while but it’s still worth a play. Again built with flash but the interface is fairly basic. It’s easy to use but there are a limited number of puzzles and no recording of puzzles completed or extra levels.

The puzzles available are pretty good though so if you run out of puzzles it’s worth heading here. Not one for the beginner though, there are no tutorials or particularly easy starter grids.

Picross-Time.net

A nice little Picross community site this one. You can play a few games without registering but if you register there are loads more plus you can save your completed games and completion times and compare with other users and so on.

Looks like user puzzles get added now and again but there are 641 puzzles available so should keep you busy for some time.

The interface is very simple, it is another Flash game but stripped back completely to the basics so each puzzle loads up very quickly. You don’t really need much more than they give you, you can fill in cells, drag and fill in multiple cells and CTRL click to mark a cell as empty.

I like it a lot and it might suit you if you want a much simpler, although still very well designed game.

Griddlers.net

Odd names aside, this is another Picross community website although the puzzles here are called ‘Griddlers’. This is however a much larger community than the above with something like 50,928 puzzles available which should keep anyone but the most insane genius busy.

Unfortunately the game client is a java applet and I have a particular dislike of java applets, mostly because they are fugly as hell but also because they always seem to arse up but this one seems pretty stable even though I had a timeout error when uploading a score. It is actually very usable although more workmanlike than pretty, you get used to it soon enough.

There is a lot to take in at this site, loads of puzzles, tutorials, a tool for creating puzzles, a huge community, community matches, downloadable PDFs of printable puzzles, a forum, etc. If I had some spare time to waste then I could probably waste it quite easily here.

…and Finally

That’s all for now, I may update this one in the future but that should give you enough to keep going for an eternity or two.

So go forth and fill in small squares because some of the best things in life are pointless.