Japanese vs Western traditions

The puzzle has been called a lot of things. Nonogram in English-language puzzle magazines, hanjie (絵描きロジック, "picture-drawing logic") in Japan, griddler in some Western circles, picross on Nintendo handhelds, paint-by-numbers in some early UK newspapers, kare karala and a dozen other names in the markets where it travelled. They are all the same puzzle.

What differs is how the puzzle is presented and, sometimes, what counts as good taste in setting one.

The Japanese tradition, where the form was popularised in the late 1980s by Non Ishida and others, leans toward picture nonograms with recognisable subjects — animals, objects, characters from popular culture, scenes. The clue lists are typically modest, the grids small to medium, and the solving experience is meant to feel like watching a small image emerge from a logic puzzle. Hanjie books are often themed: a volume of foods, a volume of seasons, a volume of zodiac animals. The puzzles converge cleanly under line-solving alone, which is part of the design — the picture is the reward, and getting stuck mid-puzzle ruins the reward.

The Western tradition, especially in the UK and the Netherlands where the form had an earlier independent run under the paint-by-numbers framing, drifted toward larger grids, more abstract subjects, and a higher tolerance for puzzles that require contradiction-based reasoning to finish. The British puzzle scene that produced The Listener and the cryptic crossword had no problem with a logic puzzle that asks for a moment of look-ahead, and griddler magazines from the late 1990s onward routinely included puzzles that line-solving alone could not finish.

The variant that became picross on the Game Boy and later the DS and 3DS sat between the two. It used the Japanese pictorial tradition for subject choice — the puzzles were always recognisable things — but adopted some Western conventions on grid size, with later titles including 20×20 and 25×25 grids that do require harder reasoning. Picross was many people's first nonogram, including most non-Japanese players who knew the form before the early-2010s puzzle-app boom.

A few practical differences across traditions that are worth knowing about. The first is the colour question: traditional hanjie and most Western nonograms are pure black-and-white, but multi-colour variants exist, where each clue carries a colour and the runs of that colour are tracked separately. Multi-colour puzzles are technically richer and visually splashier, and they remain a minority taste. The second is the picture-or-no-picture question: some Japanese puzzle books are explicit that the puzzle resolves to a picture and signal the subject in the title; some Western puzzles deliberately hide the subject so the reveal is part of the experience. The third is the grid-size convention: Japanese hanjie books tend to top out at 15×15 or 20×20 with most puzzles in the 10×10 range; Western griddler magazines routinely run 25×30 or larger.

If you've solved one tradition without realising it had a name, you've solved them all. The deductions are the same. The conventions are mostly aesthetic, and you'll develop a preference for whichever one matches the way you like to play.