The Daily Nonogram

Today’s picture, at whichever size suits the time you have. The date chooses it, which is why yours is the same drawing as everybody else’s.

Your record

• —Current streak
• —Longest streak
• —Days played
• —Best time, this size

One drawing a day, chosen by the calendar

There is nothing behind this page handing out a board of the day, because there is nothing behind this page at all. The date becomes a number, that number picks a drawing out of the library, and the same number therefore picks the same drawing on any machine running this code, without coordination and without a request. Tomorrow already exists and anyone willing to change their clock can have it; no secret is being kept and pretending otherwise would be theatre.

The library is finite, so a drawing has to come round again eventually. What it does not do is come round at random: the whole library is worked through before anything repeats, and the order is reshuffled for each pass, so nobody meets the same picture twice inside a cycle and the cycle after this one is not this one again in the same order.

Each size draws from its own set. A five is a symbol you finish on a platform; a twenty is a real drawing and a real evening. They are unrelated boards on the same date rather than the same picture at four scales, which would make three of the four sizes pointless.

Difficulty belongs to the drawing, not to the weekday

This is the one section here where the day of the week decides nothing, and the reason is worth stating plainly. Every other puzzle on this site is generated to order, so a Tuesday can be asked for a hard one. A drawing cannot be asked for anything: its numbers are read straight off it, so changing how hard it is means changing what it is a picture of. There is no dial.

So the level printed beside today’s board is the level that drawing measured when it was checked, and the archive prints the same label beside every past date. Somebody who wants a gentle one can look down the list and pick a gentle one, which is a better arrangement than a weekday rota anyway — it lets you choose rather than wait until Thursday.

What the library does guarantee is that no drawing in it needs a guess. Each was put through the solver one at a time; four had to be redrawn and one had to be abandoned outright, because a picture whose numbers describe two different pictures is not fixable, only replaceable.

The streak, the clock, and what a share gives away

Finishing any one size records the day. Playing all four does not record four, there is no leaderboard, and the number only says that you turned up — which is the one thing about a person a daily can honestly measure. Your record lives in this browser and goes nowhere; clearing site data for this domain deletes it for good.

The share text is a pace bar and a time, and it contains no part of the picture. That constraint is sharper here than anywhere else on the site: a grid of coloured squares is the obvious thing to share and it is exactly the answer, so it is the one thing that can never be shared. What travels is how you did against a par for that size and level, which is comparable between two people and reveals nothing about the drawing.

A hint names the argument it used and links to the page explaining it, so taking one is the site working rather than you failing. It does not break a streak, and it is counted in the share text — a board finished with six hints and one finished with none are different results.

Common questions

More Nonogram pages

• Nonogram puzzleUnlimited boards
• Nonogram rulesOne rule, in full
• Solving a boardA 20×20, worked
• Nonogram techniquesThe whole ladder
• OverlapTechnique — the opening
• The ends of a lineTechnique — easy
• Gaps and splittingTechnique — medium
• GlueTechnique — hard
• The whole lineTechnique — expert
• Guessing at nonogramsTechnique — refused
• Printable nonogramsFor paper
• Nonogram archiveEvery past picture