Travel Nonogram Puzzles

Buses, cars, a taxi, a truck, a gearshift, trains running into a tunnel, ships from a small fishing boat to a modern hull at a dock, a sextant, a suitcase, a hotel reception desk, and the signage that surrounds all of it — a stop sign, a parking sign, traffic lights, the pictograms on a washroom door. It is the shelf of getting somewhere, and it is built almost entirely from objects that were designed to be recognised quickly.

That gives the set a distinct character as puzzles: these are boxy, right-angled subjects. A bus is a rectangle with windows cut out of it, a truck is two rectangles at different heights, a road is a pair of long parallel edges. Right angles produce long clue runs and clean, repeated numbers, which is why so much of this shelf is rated normal rather than hard — the overlap rule keeps paying out, and the picture holds together early. If a category in the catalog can be described as forgiving at a larger size, it is this one.

The signage subjects are worth pulling out separately, because they hide a technique. A stop sign, a parking sign and a set of traffic lights are all symmetrical about their vertical axis, and several are symmetrical about the horizontal too. Once you have established a few cells on one side, the mirrored cells on the other are very often forced — not by the symmetry itself, which a nonogram does not guarantee, but by the crossing clues that the symmetry makes it easy to spot. Read the pair of column clues equidistant from the centre and compare them; when they match, everything you learn about one applies to the other.

The ships are the exception to the boxy rule and the most interesting boards here. A hull is a long shallow curve, a mast is a single vertical stroke, and rigging is a scatter of ones — three different kinds of clue on one board. They tend to reward working the mast and the waterline first, both of which are long runs, and leaving the rigging until the crossing clues have narrowed it. The sextant is the busiest thing on the shelf, though busy is not the same as hard: the two boards that actually carry the hard rating here are neither ships nor vehicles but the alarm and the town crier, both of which are radiating shapes rather than solid ones.

A good share of the set is built at twenty cells a side rather than fifteen, because a vehicle needs the extra room to stop being a rectangle with dots on it. That makes this a reasonable place to make the step up to the larger grid: the subjects are simple enough that the size is the only new variable, which is not true if you make the same step in a category full of curled or radial shapes.

One caution on picking by name. Several titles here describe the sign rather than the journey — a washroom pictogram, a rating in stars, a speedometer. They are legitimate puzzles and they solve cleanly, but if you came for vehicles specifically, sort by size and take the twenty-cell boards, which is where most of the trains and road vehicles sit — though a couple of the ships stayed at fifteen.

If you are using this shelf to practise rather than to pass an evening, there is a sequence in it. The road signs are the best place to see mirror reasoning work, whatever size they are drawn at. The road vehicles come next and teach the thing this category is really good for: holding a long horizontal edge — a roofline, a chassis — and using it to settle a dozen columns at once instead of one. The trains extend that to two long edges running in parallel. The ships come last, because they are the only boards here that take away the long run and make you work from short clues and gaps, which is the skill every other category is going to ask for.