RPG & game icons Nonogram Puzzles

This is the vocabulary of a game interface rather than the furniture of a fantasy novel: breastplates and shoulder guards, a dagger and a combat knife, a wand with an orb at its tip, a potion, a trebuchet, a troll, a spider, and the small abstract badges a game uses to tell you that something has happened — an achievement rank, a skull counting kills, a stack of gold. Some of it is medieval and some of it is modern, because the icon sets these come from cover whatever a game might need to put in a corner of the screen.

Icons make unusually good nonograms, and the reason is worth understanding before you start. An icon has to be legible at a size where almost nothing survives, so its designer has already thrown away every detail that was not load-bearing and centred what remains. That is very close to what a nonogram needs: a subject reduced to the fewest marks that still read as the thing. Where a photograph gives you a grey smear at fifteen cells across, a shield icon gives you a shape whose outline was drawn on a grid to begin with.

The set splits into two kinds of board, and the split is not the one the subjects suggest. What matters is whether an icon is drawn filled or hollow. A shield, a tank, a skull, a lantern, a troll — solid silhouettes with a defined edge — give you long clue runs, the overlap rule pays out immediately, and the picture announces itself halfway through. A breastplate, a dagger, a banknote or a cut diamond are outlines with detail inside them, and an outline on a grid is a staircase of ones and twos wrapped around a hollow centre, with no long run anywhere to anchor a first deduction. Two boards of the same subject family can sit on opposite sides of that line.

That difference, and not the grid size, is what the difficulty ratings are tracking here. A hard board is usually one whose clue list looks short and sparse, which reads as easier and is in fact the harder case: a clue of 1 tells you where a cell might be rather than where it is. Read the clue numbers before you pick, not the title. Long numbers mean a filled shape and a quick solve; a wall of ones and twos means an outline, and outlines are where the hours go — which is why the breastplates, the knives and the ritual circles carry the hard rating while the shield and the tank beside them do not.

One practical trick applies to more of these boards than you might expect. A great many icons are mirror-symmetrical about their vertical axis, because that is how you make a small shape look deliberate rather than accidental. You cannot assume symmetry — some are not — but you can use it: when a row's clue reads the same forwards and backwards and the cells you have already placed sit symmetrically, the rest of that row very often completes the pattern. Check the column clues before committing, and the guess turns into a deduction.

The set also carries the widest span of board sizes of the newer shelves, from a single small grid up to a full thirty-by-thirty skull, so it is not a category to work through in order from the top. Pick by size first and by subject second, and treat the largest boards as a separate sitting rather than the next puzzle in a run.

Where this shelf sits relative to the rest of the catalog is roughly alongside alchemy, and for the same reason: both are collections of symbols rather than pictures of objects, so both reward a solver who is comfortable reading a clue list as a shape rather than as a description. If you have worked through the alchemical set and liked how the busier glyphs behaved, this is the natural next shelf. If you found those frustrating, the everyday objects and travel sets are built from far more forgiving material and are a better place to spend the next hour.