Music & media Nonogram Puzzles

Two related shelves sharing one room. On one side are instruments — a harp, an accordion, a marimba, a leather drum, panpipes, a flute, a tambourine, a piano keyboard, a sheet of notation and a single quaver. On the other is the gear that captures and plays things back: a clapperboard, a film reel, a television, a webcam, a security camera, a loudspeaker, a set of VU meters. The two halves look unrelated until you solve a few and notice they fail in the same way.

The thing that makes this category distinctive as puzzles is repetition. A piano keyboard is a row of identical keys. A marimba is a row of bars getting shorter. A harp is a fan of parallel strings. A sheet of notation is five parallel lines. A VU meter is a row of bars at different heights. On a nonogram grid, a repeating pattern shows up as a clue list of repeating numbers — a column reading 1 1 1 1 1 1, or a row of identical twos — and that is a very particular solving experience. Repeated clues rarely resolve one at a time; they resolve all at once, when a single crossing line finally fixes where the pattern starts.

The practical consequence is that these boards reward patience at the beginning and then collapse quickly. It is normal to stare at a keyboard or a harp for a while with almost nothing placed, because every column looks the same and none of them is forced yet. Find the one line that is not part of the pattern — the frame around the keys, the pillar of the harp, the top line of the stave — solve that, and the repeating section falls in a few moves. Do not try to reason about the repeated columns individually; look for the thing that breaks the repetition.

The gear half behaves differently. A television, a clapperboard and a loudspeaker are solid rectangles with something inside them, which makes them among the friendlier boards on the shelf: long clue runs on the outside, a small amount of interior detail to finish. A film reel is the exception and it is rated hard for the reason every ring-shaped subject in this catalog is rated hard — concentric circles on a square grid are nested staircases with hollow centres, and no clue in them is long enough for the overlap rule to bite.

That is worth stating plainly, because it is the most reliable way to pick a board here. The hard-rated ones are the flute, the tambourine, the film reel and a small volume glyph: a thin tube seen at an angle, a ring, a set of rings, and a symbol built from a few isolated marks. Everything with a body — the drum, the accordion, the television, the loudspeaker — sits at normal. Thin and hollow is hard, solid is not, and the subject matter has almost nothing to do with it.

The shelf spans three grid sizes, most of it at fifteen and twenty cells a side with a single thirty-cell keyboard at the top end. That largest board is the clearest example of everything above: it is almost entirely repetition, so it looks impossible for the first few minutes and then finishes far faster than its size suggests. It is a good board to attempt after you have solved one or two of the smaller patterned ones, and a frustrating one to meet first.

If you are arriving from elsewhere in the catalog, the closest neighbour is the tools shelf: both are built from man-made objects with a clear structural logic, and both split into a solid half that solves quickly and a thin or hollow half that does not. The difference is that tools give you a long handle to start on almost every time, while here you have to go looking for the line that breaks the pattern.