Nature Nonogram Puzzles

Weather and the seasons, mostly: rain falling, a cloud with sun behind it, wind as curled strokes of moving air, a snowdrop pushing up through the ground, summer rays, the bare tangle of roots, an umbrella, a pair of sunglasses, a thermometer with its three scales, a campsite. It is the shelf with the fewest man-made objects on it, and it behaves differently from the rest of the catalog because of that.

Natural subjects have no straight lines to lend you. A cloud is a curve, rain is a scatter of short strokes, wind is a set of parallel arcs, roots branch and taper. Where a vehicle or a tool hands you a long run that the overlap rule settles for free, these boards hand you clue lists made of ones, twos and threes. That sounds harder and mostly is not, because the pictures here are also sparse — there is a lot of empty sky in a weather icon — and empty cells are as informative as filled ones once you are marking them properly. This is a good shelf on which to practise that habit specifically.

The set contains something the rest of the catalog does not: two subjects drawn twice at different densities on the same grid size. There is a crescent moon and a larger crescent moon, and a board of raindrops and one of heavier rain, all four at fifteen cells a side. In both pairs the smaller version is rated normal and the larger one hard. Nothing about the frame changed between them — same width, same height, same subject, same style. What changed is how many separate marks the picture is made of.

That pair is the clearest demonstration in the catalog of where nonogram difficulty actually comes from. More rain means more short runs and more gaps, which means more clue numbers per line and more ways they can slide along it. Fewer, longer marks pin themselves down; many small marks do not. If you have ever wondered why one board took ten minutes and another of the same size took forty, solve these four in order and the answer stops being abstract.

The rest of the shelf follows the same rule quietly. The third hard board is a burst of spray — again, many small separated marks. Everything rated normal is built from a small number of larger shapes: one cloud, one sun, one umbrella, one pair of sunglasses. Read the clue list before you commit and count how many numbers are in the longest line; a line of six or seven small numbers is a warning, a line of two or three is an invitation.

Half the shelf sits at fifteen cells and half at twenty, and unusually the larger boards here are not the harder ones. A twenty-cell frame gives a cloud or a set of roots room to be drawn with fewer, longer strokes, so several of the biggest pictures on this shelf are among the gentler solves on it. If you want a large board that will not eat an evening, this is a better place to look than the tools or the RPG shelves.

Two boards on the shelf are not weather in the usual sense and are worth knowing about before you pick one. A thermometer showing its three scales side by side is a column of repeated tick marks, which solves like the patterned boards on the music shelf rather than like anything else here: nothing moves for a while, then a single crossing line fixes where the ticks begin and the rest follows at once. A campsite is an ordinary solid object that happens to have landed in a weather category, and one of the easiest large boards in the catalog.

One thematic note for anyone browsing rather than practising: the seasons are all represented — a snowdrop for spring, rays for summer, an autumn board and a winter freeze — and they make a natural set of four to work through together. They are all rated normal, they span both grid sizes, and finishing the four gives you a small complete collection rather than four unrelated puzzles.