5×5 Nonogram Puzzles

The 5×5 bucket is the shortest way into nonograms, and it is worth being straight about what it contains: thirty-seven puzzles, of which thirty-five are letters and numbers. This is the alphabet page. One animal and one everyday object make up the remainder, and every board is a true 5×5 — twenty-five cells, no rectangles, no exceptions.

It is also the only genuinely easy shelf on the site. All thirty-five of those letters and numbers are rated easy, and they are the only puzzles anywhere in the catalog carrying that rating — nothing at 10×10 or above does. If you have never solved a nonogram before, this is the correct place to start, and it is the only place where the rating system will hold your hand.

What you learn here is notation rather than technique, and that is by design. Twenty-five cells is not enough room for the deduction methods that matter later: a clue of 3 in a five-cell line forces just one cell, and a clue of 4 forces three. You can very nearly read a letter straight off its clues. The point of these boards is to make the grammar automatic — that the numbers beside a row describe blocks in order, that a gap of at least one empty cell sits between them, that a row and its column have to agree — so that when a bigger grid stops being readable at a glance, you are only learning the new thing.

Two boards break the theme, and they are worth seeking out precisely because they do: one animal and one everyday object, both at 5×5, both rated normal rather than easy. They are the smallest puzzles on the site that ask you to actually deduce something rather than recognise a shape you already know the name of.

When the letters stop taking any thought, go to 10×10. That is where the overlap rule starts paying real dividends and where the catalog's variety actually begins: most of the themes have something at that size, against a handful here.