Alchemy Nonogram Puzzles

If you've already worked through a few 10×10 warm-ups elsewhere on the site and want to see whether the overlap method and empty-cell marking still hold up on a busier board, this is a reasonable next stop — though it's not the easiest starting point for a first-ever nonogram, since most of the set sits at 15×15 and up. Potion bottles, pentagrams, and cauldrons all hide small asymmetries that keep a solve honest even after you think you've spotted the picture.

A practical tip for this set: on the busier 15×15 boards, resist diving into the middle where the detail is thickest. The long edge clues — a full row of glass shelving, the straight neck of a tall bottle — force more cells per deduction, so lock the outer frame of the workbench in first and the fiddly interior of labels, bubbling liquid and wisps of smoke tends to fall into place with far less backtracking. It's the same overlap-and-edges routine as any nonogram; it just pays off more here, because these pictures carry more internal detail than the site average.

The subjects come from real alchemical notation rather than generic fantasy props, which is part of what makes them work at this size. Historical alchemists used a compact set of glyphs for the elements and the planetary metals — a triangle for fire, an inverted triangle for water, the crossed circle for antimony, the crescent for silver — and those symbols were designed centuries ago to stay legible when scratched into a margin by hand. That is almost exactly the constraint a nonogram grid imposes, so they translate onto a 15×15 board far more cleanly than a naturalistic drawing of the same idea ever would.

Expect a mix of those bare glyphs and fuller scenes: some puzzles resolve into a single stark symbol, others into a whole bench of equipment. Only a minority is rated hard, so the category is not uniformly demanding — but if you're not sure which end to start from, take one of the 10×10s first and use it to get a feel for how densely these pictures pack their detail before committing to a 20×20.

Four of the boards are the classical elements, and they are worth solving as a set because of how differently they behave. Earth and Fire and Water all sit at 15×15, yet Earth is rated hard while Fire and Water are normal; Air is the 20×20 and is hard too. Same conceptual family, same source notation, split down the middle by difficulty — which is a useful reminder that in a nonogram the subject matters far less than how its outline happens to meet the grid.

Another four come from the planetary metals, the correspondence that sat at the centre of alchemical practice: Mercury for quicksilver, Silver Luna Moon for silver, and Jupiter and Saturn for tin and lead. Mercury is the gentlest of the four at 10×10; Silver Luna Moon is the one rated hard. Solving them together gives you a small tour of a system that treated the planets and the metals as two faces of the same thing, which is a more interesting hour than the puzzles alone would suggest.

The size ladder here has a cliff at the top rather than a slope. The largest boards on the shelf — Element Air and the long-named Brimstone Black Sulfur Leviathan Cross — are rated hard, so there is no gentle large board to warm up on the way an animal or a food subject would give you. Plan to arrive at those two with the 15×15s already comfortable rather than treating them as the next step.

One property of this notation is worth exploiting deliberately: a great many alchemical glyphs are left-right symmetric. Antimony, sulphur and the elemental triangles all mirror about a vertical axis, which means the column clues on the left half repeat on the right. Reading the column clues inward from both ends before you place anything, and noting where they match, turns a symmetric board into roughly half a board — the same shortcut that makes the hats and masks set worth practising, arriving here from a completely different tradition.