Sports Nonogram Puzzles

The smallest of the newer shelves and the most mixed. Some of it is the equipment: a baseball, a bowling ball and its pins, a rugby helmet, a kettlebell, a bicycle, a ski, a karate belt. The rest is what happens afterwards — a trophy, a medal, a chequered finish, and the numbered places on a podium. Worth knowing before you browse, because a fair part of the shelf is awards rather than sport, and if you came for equipment specifically there is less here than the label suggests.

As puzzles the equipment and the awards behave in opposite ways, and both are useful. A trophy, a medal and a podium place are compact, symmetrical, mostly solid shapes with a clear outline, which makes them some of the most straightforward boards in the catalog at their size: long clue runs down the cup and the stand, a symmetrical pair of column clues either side of the centre, and a picture that resolves early. The equipment is more varied — a bicycle is almost all thin lines, a helmet is a solid mass, a ski is one long diagonal.

The two hard-rated boards on the shelf are the bowling ball and the kettlebell, and they are hard for the same reason as each other. Both are circles with a hole in them: the ball has its finger holes, the kettlebell its handle. A circle on a square grid is already a staircase of short runs, and putting a gap in the middle of it removes the one thing that would have helped — the solid interior that turns the middle rows into long clues. Everything else here, including the boards twice their size, sits at normal.

That makes this a good shelf for a specific purpose: proving to yourself that grid size is not difficulty. Most of the set is built at twenty cells a side, most of it is rated normal, and the two boards that will actually slow you down are among the smaller ones. If you have been avoiding twenty-cell boards because they look like a commitment, the medals and the trophy here are the gentlest large puzzles on the site to start with.

The podium set is worth taking as a group. First, second and third place are drawn as separate boards, along with a silver-place variant and a winner's medal, and solving them in sequence shows how a designer changes one element at a time — the number on the block, the height of the step, the ribbon — while everything around it stays put. As nonograms that means four or five boards whose clue lists are nearly identical for most lines and differ sharply in two or three. Solving them back to back is unusually satisfying, and it trains the eye to spot which line carries the actual information.

The bicycle deserves a separate warning. It is rated normal and it is not a difficult board, but it is the one picture here made almost entirely of thin lines — two wheel rims, a frame of struts, handlebars — so it solves in a completely different rhythm from everything beside it. Expect no long runs, expect to work from the gaps, and expect the picture to stay unrecognisable until quite late. If the rest of the shelf has been feeling mechanical, that is the board to take next.

Because the shelf is small, it is one of the few in the catalog you can reasonably finish. There is no size ladder to climb and no subject that requires a technique the others do not, so working through all of it is a single evening rather than a project — a reasonable thing to do after a larger category has started to feel like homework.