Printable Nonograms

Choose a size, a level and a number of boards, and print. Answers begin on a fresh page, so nobody reads one over your shoulder by accident.

Six boards a page, at a size you can shade

Six boards to a batch by default, two across a page, at a scale that leaves the numbers legible and the cells big enough to shade with a pencil. That second part matters more here than on any other printable on this site, because a nonogram is solved by filling cells solidly — a grid whose cells are four millimetres across is a grid you cannot mark without obliterating the guide lines you are counting against.

The heavier rules every five cells are printed too, and they are not decoration. Counting to eleven along an unbroken twenty-cell row is the commonest way to get one of these wrong on paper, where there is no undo; with the guides it is counting to two and then one.

Nothing on the page is an image. Each board is drawn as ordinary markup by the same renderer that draws the one you play on, so it prints at whatever resolution the printer runs at rather than turning into a grey approximation. The interface, the navigation and the controls are removed from the printed output entirely rather than hidden — a hidden element still occupies space and still paginates, which is how a one-page sheet becomes one page of boards followed by three blank ones.

Which size suits which occasion

For a classroom, 5×5 on easy is almost always right. It fits twelve to a double-sided sheet, takes two or three minutes, and needs only one idea — that a long number has to cover the middle of its line — which can be explained in about a minute at the board.

For a long journey, 15×15 at medium or hard is the sweet spot. Big enough that the picture is worth arriving at, small enough that a mistake found late does not cost the whole afternoon, and at those levels the board keeps producing without demanding that you write out every arrangement of a row.

Print 20×20 at easy or medium rather than expert unless you enjoy bookkeeping. A twenty at expert is generated honestly and is a fine puzzle, but working a twenty-cell line out arrangement by arrangement in pencil is a test of patience as much as of reasoning, and the same argument on a ten is just as sharp and a quarter of the work.

Paper gets the same boards, checked the same way

Printed boards come from the same generator as the ones on screen and are held to the same standard: exactly one arrangement satisfies every line, and it is reachable by argument at the level printed on the sheet. There is no second, sloppier path for paper.

That matters more on paper than anywhere else, because paper has no undo and because a nonogram mistake propagates. One cell filled wrongly in a row makes a column impossible thirty moves later, and by then there is nothing to tell you whether the fault was yours or the board’s. A printed board with two answers wastes an afternoon and gives you no way to find that out, which is also why the answer pages are printed by default rather than offered as an extra.

Common questions

More Nonogram pages

• Nonogram puzzleUnlimited boards
• Daily nonogramA new picture every day
• 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
• Nonogram archiveEvery past picture