The History of Nonograms
A logic puzzle invented independently, on opposite sides of the world, within a few years of each other - and named after one of its two inventors.
Two Inventors, Two Continents
The puzzle traces back to two independent inventions in the mid-1980s: Non Ishida, a Japanese graphics editor, created grid puzzles that revealed pictures through clue-based logic around 1985, while at almost the same time British puzzle designer James Dalgety invented a similar concept and coined the name 'Griddlers'.
Ishida's puzzles were published in a Japanese puzzle magazine and quickly caught on; the name 'Nonogram' itself is generally understood as a blend of 'Non' (her given name) and '-gram', though the puzzle is known by several other names in different countries, including Griddlers, Picross, and Hanjie.
From Magazines to Game Boy
Nintendo popularized the puzzle worldwide under the name 'Picross' (a portmanteau of 'picture' and 'crossword'), releasing Picross games for the Game Boy and Super Famicom starting in 1995 - for many players outside Japan, that handheld series was their first encounter with the format.
The puzzle's appeal turned out to travel well beyond dedicated video games: newspaper puzzle pages picked it up alongside Sudoku during the 2000s puzzle boom, usually under the name Griddlers or Hanjie, and it remains a staple of puzzle books and apps today.
A Puzzle That Needs No Guessing (Usually)
A well-constructed Nonogram is designed to be solvable through pure logical deduction alone, line by line, without ever needing to guess - which is exactly the property PaperGames's own puzzles are checked for before being included, using a constraint-propagation solver that confirms each picture's clues admit one and only one valid grid.
That's not true of every possible clue set, though: like Minesweeper, general Nonogram solving has been proven NP-complete, meaning a large enough or deliberately adversarial puzzle can require genuine backtracking-style guesswork to crack - well-designed puzzles for human solvers are specifically built to avoid that, which is itself a small art form.