January 31, 2026
Pixels, peace, and petty beef
Nonograms: a practical guide with interactive examples
Calming brain candy or app war bait—nonograms go mainstream
TLDR: An interactive Nonograms guide landed, teaching the “fill only when certain” rules of this pixel puzzle. Comments turned into a vibe-check: fans say it’s stress therapy, a dev self-plugged a free app, and a mini platform war erupted between nonograms-katana.com and liouh.com/picross2.
Nonograms—the pixel-art puzzles where numbers tell you which squares to fill and which to cross—just got a flashy, interactive guide, but the real show is the comments. The creator casually drops, “I built this,” then soft-launches their free app (no Android yet), sparking a chorus of “take my phone, I need peace.” Fans swoon over the rule-of-thumb—fill only when certain, mark zeros with crosses—calling it “calming in times of stress.” Meanwhile, the community instantly splits into camps, turning a tutorial into an app showdown. One crew swears by nonograms-katana.com and its big community, while another crowns the random generator at liouh.com/picross2 as the internet’s best, bragging they regenerate puzzles until the numbers behave. Cue the small-screen drama: phone players lament tiny grids, laptop purists declare their computers a games-free sanctuary. And then the meme moment—someone confesses they thought this was about “nomograms” (a totally different chart thing), learning the holy trinity of monograms, nonograms, and nomograms in one scroll. It’s wholesome brain yoga meets petty platform beef: therapy vs addiction, generators vs curated puzzles, web vs mobile. The grid may be tidy, but the comments are gloriously chaotic.
Key Points
- •Nonograms are image puzzles solved by filling cells based on numeric row and column clues.
- •A single number in a row or column indicates exactly that many filled cells, but placement must be deduced without guessing.
- •Multiple numbers in a line denote multiple groups of filled cells, each separated by at least one empty cell.
- •Rules for rows apply equally to columns, enabling cross-referencing for deductions.
- •Definite empty cells are marked with crosses; lines with zero are entirely empty, and once a line’s quota is met, remaining cells are marked empty.