Free printable nonograms
10 picross puzzles in PDF, with answers.

One A4 PDF, ready for the printer: 10 picture nonograms, a how-to-solve guide on the first page, answer key at the back. No signup, no email, no watermark.

Download the free PDF
10 puzzles + answer key · A4 · 58 KB
Play the same 10 in your browser
no printer, no signup · progress saved on your device
See the 100-puzzle book
on itch.io · instant download

What a nonogram is

A nonogram — also sold as picross, griddler, hanjie or Japanese crossword — is a logic puzzle played on a grid. The numbers along each row and column give the lengths of the runs of filled squares in that line, in order, with at least one empty square between runs.

That is the entire rule. When the grid closes, the filled squares form a picture — which is how you know you got it right before you ever look at the answer key.

  1. Start with the big numbers. A clue of 10 on a row of 10 fills the whole row, no thinking required.
  2. Use overlap. A clue of 7 on a row of 10 always fills the middle 4 squares: slide the run as far left as it goes, then as far right, and keep what both have in common.
  3. Mark a dot in every square you know is empty. Knowing where a run cannot fit is half the game.
  4. Alternate rows and columns. Each new deduction unlocks others; solvers who only read horizontally stall early.

You never have to guess. If you are stuck, there is a deducible square somewhere on the grid.

Those four rules with a worked example each, and the alien from this pack opened pass by pass until the picture appears: how to solve nonograms, step by step.

Stuck on a puzzle from somewhere else? Type its clues into the nonogram solver — it runs the same solver that signed off these ten, and it says which row or column makes the clues impossible when they are.

Rather not print anything? Five puzzles play right in the browser — fill, mark, and the picture appears when the grid closes: the free nonogram sampler on itch.io, no download and no account.

Making your own instead? Draw it in the nonogram checker — it counts the clues off your picture and then tells you whether the puzzle closes on logic alone, marking the cells that would force a guess. It is the same check these ten had to pass.

The ten in this pack

Five at 10×10 (★, to warm up), four at 15×15 (★★) and one at 20×20 (★★★). Each picture's name appears only in the answer key at the back, so nothing is spoiled before you solve it.

Printing these for a class? The ten sheets ranked by how hard they actually are — measured on the solver, not by grid size — plus a 45-minute lesson plan: nonograms in the classroom.

Why "solver-verified" is not just a phrase

The classic defect in a printed nonogram is the puzzle that does not close on logic alone: at some point the human has to guess between two possibilities and backtrack if it goes wrong. That flaw is invisible in the PDF — it shows up on your kitchen table, half an hour in. Before any of these ten made it onto a page, a solver rejected the puzzle unless all three of these held:

  1. It completes with row-and-column logic only, with no trial and error at any step.
  2. The solution is unique — no second grid satisfies the same numbers.
  3. The solution is the picture we drew: the solver re-derives the grid from the clues alone and compares it to the original, square by square.

A puzzle that fails is not patched by hand — it is thrown out. It is the same solver that runs over all 100 puzzles in the book.

Print as many copies as you like

This pack is free for personal use and for classroom use — a teacher may print it for a whole class. What you may not do is sell it or bundle it into another product.

And none of these ten are in the book

These ten pictures were drawn for Pixel Logic vol. 1 and left over when the book filled up at 100 (40 at 10×10, 35 at 15×15, 25 at 20×20). This is not an extract: download the pack, buy the book later, and you pay for nothing twice. That is not a promise — the script that assembles this pack re-checks it against all 100 puzzles of the book on every build, by grid and by the word printed in the answer key, and refuses to write the PDF if the sentence stops being true.

The full book is 100 picture nonograms, all proven the same way, with the how-to-solve guide up front and an answer key naming every picture. A4 PDF, 115 pages, instant download, print it as often as you like.

Pixel Logic — 100 picture nonograms
on itch.io, where the free bonus pack lives too

Also printable

🧩 Nonogramas em português

A mesma amostra de 10 nonogramas em português, e o livro de 100 vendido em reais na Hotmart. Ver a página em português

🖱️ No printer handy?

The same ten puzzles, playable in the browser: click to fill, mark the empties, and the picture appears. Play nonograms online

🛠️ Godot 4 tools

The studio also makes tools for game developers — autotile generation and localization QA for the Godot engine. See the studio